


What We Leave Behind

by shadesfalcon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anger, Canon-Typical Violence, Deaf Clint Barton, Depression, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutants, On Hiatus, Past Abuse, Permanent Injury, Plot, Self-Hatred, Sexual Content, Slow Build, Suicidal Thoughts, arguably canon-compliant until age of ultron, eventually, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-04-07 14:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 43,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4266672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>*****ON INDEFINITE HIATUS***** (I'm sorry, this fic hates me. I'm leaving it up here for Reasons, but it just wasn't matching my vision, and I got tired of fighting it.)</p><p>Clint Barton, newly made SHIELD Agent, is stumbling through his new life, finally coming to a bitter sense of awareness about the state of the world. It doesn't matter where you are, or what you're doing. Life is nothing but the taste of death, echoing back through one's life. There more you touch, the more you destroy. There's a deep and bitter anger, pulsing somewhere under his skin, and it's getting harder and harder to hold back.</p><p>And then Natalia Romanova trips up his understanding of the world. Her anger is just as deep and just as bitter, but she's got the energy left for one more leap. One more attempt at life.</p><p>Reluctant, but not wholly unwilling, Clint agrees to join her on this last try. Maybe, between the two of them, they understand enough of the world to find its happiness. Maybe there's a life out there for them, just around the corner. Maybe everything is about to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reflection

 

 

Entropy is the defining force in the universe. The crashing paths of entities colliding with each other chips away at the conglomerate whole. Everything – people, things, time – hurtles together, rebounds, and rushes back across the stars, leaving the universe a little more worn. A little more broken.

Entropy is the promise that meetings mean destruction, interactions invite pain, and knowing another person is definitionally impossible.

 

 

The night was warm, with a light breeze shifting across the rooftops. It swept through dark alleys and collided with plaster walls. Canopies rustled and lost papers shuffled across the ground. A few lone figures hurried down the streets, but the night was mostly empty.

Clint pulled the bowstring a little tighter, more to feel the press through his finger guards than to give the arrow the potential for more propulsion. The man in his sights wasn’t going to be any less dead because the weapon buried itself a centimeter less deep than it otherwise would have.

He was bored. The black gulf of immobility hovered on the edge of his vision. The night was silent and heavy, and it felt like he’d crawled inside his own mind. Oppressive and still.

He took a slow breath, and loosed the arrow. Then, without even waiting to watch it hit its target, he turned to look out across the empty roof.

“Mission complete,” he told his comm, breaking the silence of the night. “See you on the other side.”

“Negative,” someone denied through the semi-static. “We have your extraction on the way. Take cover and wait for it.”

“It’s going to take too long. Trust me on this one.”

There was a pause as Clint’s eyes tracked a wide circle and then focused on the metal balcony across the street. That would probably take his weight.

“Are you in danger?” his handler-of-the-week asked, and Clint could hear him wavering.

 _About to be_ , he thought.

“Something like that,” he said out loud.

“Then do what you need to do. We’ll go on radio silence for the next few minutes. Godspeed, Barton.”

Clint was already sprinting across the rooftop. It was covered in soft gravel and for one heart-stopping moment, Clint lost his footing a few steps before he leapt. He wobbled, arms out and leg muscles tight, as he got his rhythm under control.

And then he was back, flying the last few steps before he planted his foot on the concrete edge and actually flew.

It was not graceful. He pinwheeled, enjoying the weighty tug of gravity as he reached the peak of the jump and began to plummet.

God, he was moving so fast.

He slammed into the outer side of the balcony with a painful grunt, as his fingers scrambled for a hold on the Corinthian-style black metal bars. He almost didn’t make it, falling all the way down the outside of the balcony, but then he wrapped his fingers around the bottom of the bars in a white knuckle grip and braced for the jerk.

His rebound twisted his body clockwise as his legs flailed around, and he felt his left shoulder wrench out of socket at the same time that the top part of the balcony railings came out of the wall on either side. His momentum carried him back against the wall, and the metal shrieked in protest. Chunks of Italian plaster crumbled and fell to the cobblestones twenty-something feet below. He dangled, glad his fingers were strong and calloused, as he hung in empty space.

Not subtle.

But not boring.

He decided to risk the injury and let go, because who knew how long this thing was actually going to stay in the wall? His legs kicked as he oriented his body and then there was impact. Feet, knee, hip, shoulder, head – _oops_ – knee, shoulder, head – _shit_. He was a little surprised when he got to his feet with only some slight dizziness and the dislocated shoulder.

He looked up at the small group of people staring at him from across the street. It had to be three in the morning here. Why were they even out of bed?

“Stay in school, kids,” he said in English, before he limped off to disappear into the darkness of an uninhabited alley.

Hurtling across the roof had been engaging, but he now had to deal with the consequences of abandoning his extraction plan. Which was fine by him. Extraction plans went south more than half the time anyway. They only increased the chance of survival if the agent themselves had worse odds.

Clint might not have the experience that some of the older agents had, but he had the street knowledge. He had a map of the city in his head. He had a few tips from the local lowlifes. He had –

_ow, fucking ow_

– a dislocated shoulder. He probably shouldn’t be reaching for door handles like that. He fumbled at the door with his right hand. The grip of the handle in his non-dominant hand felt strange, but then, so did the dislocated shoulder.

At least shoulders weren’t like knees. The wrong angle on those things meant pinching off the wrong artery and suddenly you were missing half your leg. Shoulders meant you had to watch out for humeral head shit, but that still beat a pinched femoral artery.

He slipped through the backdoor of the shady bar and waved at Carlo, who he’d made friends with earlier that night thanks to a couple handfuls of cash. Satisfied that no one in the bar seemed like they were searching for an elusive assassin with a bow, Clint ducked up the stairs to the second story.

 _Motherfucking roof access,_ he crowed to himself. Then made a face. If he was going to climb around Italy’s roofs, then it was time to get the shoulder back into joint, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

He looked around and found a flat heavy wooden table sitting against the hallway wall. Using his good hand, he pulled it free far enough that he could lie down on it, and then grabbed a heavy book and placed it on the edge where his feet would be.

Lying down on his stomach, he braced himself with his right arm and took deep a slow breath. If he didn’t relax, this would just hurt like hell and accomplish nothing.

Slowly, he reached back and grasped the book with his injured arm, and then let his arm fall. It swung, sped and pulled by the weight of the book and Clint heard the _chunk_ of grating bone at the same time that he cried out sharply.

Unfortunately, he cried out just as the radio in his ear sparked back to life.

“Barton?” the voice asked, only it wasn’t just some voice. That was Coulson.

Clint moan in pain, partially against the ache still pulsing deep in his shoulder, and partially because Coulson on the line didn’t bode well for him. That man had a sixth sense about people and their bullshit. Clint’s especially.

At the sound of the groan, Coulson stayed silent for a moment, and Clint took the opportunity to climb off the table. He eyed the window carefully.

“Barton?” Coulson repeated, and Clint sighed heavily.

“What’s up, oh great voice in my head? Did you try that coffee I recommended the other day?”

“Barton,” Coulson said yet again, although it wasn’t a question this time.

Silence. Long and empty like a hallway in a dark warehouse. Cold concrete closing in and covered with thick dust.

“Yeah,” Clint finally gave in.

“In your own words, please tell me exactly what made you choose to jump off a roof rather than meet up with your extraction team.”

Clint tried out several lies in his head, but they all fell flat. It might have been psychological, since he didn’t actually think he could pull one over on Coulson, but it led to the same conclusion.

“Nothing at all,” he answered flippantly.

The silence was back. Clint had always believed that silence was the worst part of a person. It held the most promise for hurt.

“I’ll see you in my office when you get back, Agent. After your debrief.”

The low-level static cut off and Clint ran his fingers through his hair. So he still had to make his own way back to the states, _and_ he’d managed to piss Coulson off. He shouldn’t be pulling shit like this, not when he’d only been cleared for missions like this a few weeks ago. He was on thin ice.

And for what? To grasp for a brief adrenaline spike. A stopgap measure against the encroaching subconscious of his own mind. Was that even worth it?

 _Yes,_ he reminded himself. _Worth it._

***

“Can you give me a single good reason for why you decided to jump off the roof?”

“I felt it was the best idea at the time,” Clint answered. He wasn’t even looking at Coulson. Yeah, he was holding his stiff parade rest, but his eyes were tracing the edge of the bookcase behind Coulson’s desk.

“You’re not even trying here, Agent.”

He really wasn’t. He knew he probably should be, but he couldn’t seem to summon the energy needed. He’d stumbled through the SHIELD security gate thirty-something hours after reducing his own shoulder, and it had been a very eventful thirty-something hours.

On-edge and brimming with desperate adrenaline, he’d found himself put through a rigorous debriefing. Luckily, it focused on the actual mission itself, and skimmed over the lack of an actual extraction.

Clint knew he wouldn’t be so lucky in an hour or so, and the worst part was that the battle-readiness was wearing off. His eyelids started to stick closed, and he put his head down on the table at least once.

By the time they let him go, his mind had become a check-list.

·       Finish debrief

·       Sign statement

·       Walk to Coulson’s office

·       Answer Coulson’s questions

·       Sign counseling form

·       Bed

One, two, three, four, five, six. With six being the operative goal.

It didn’t leave a lot of room for subtle half-truths and witty banter. So he just kept tracing the edge of the bookshelf with his eyes. Coulson would get worn out by this eventually, and Clint would be free to go. Until the next time he couldn’t keep his adrenaline-junkie part of himself out of his missions.

“I know you’re tired,” Coulson continued. “But I need you to get it together and work with me. I don’t have anything. There’s no ammunition for me to back you up here.”

If Coulson was trying to defend him, that meant someone was attacking him. Someone up the chain of command had finally decided that there wasn’t enough black in Clint’s ledger to make up for his smart mouth and tendency to fall off buildings. Warning lights went off in Clint’s subconscious.

Clint’s conscious mind stared plaintively at the warning lights and promptly decided there wasn’t enough energy to give a shit. His eyes traced the bookcase again. It was a nice bookcase. Sturdy. Full.

“You really have nothing?” Coulson sighed, and for a moment he sounded just a weary as Clint. “You cannot dredge up a single reason why you risked resources, endangered yourself and the information you carry, and repeatedly lied to Agent Saddler while he was operating your mission?”

Clint kept staring. God, sometimes talking took so much effort. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to take a deep enough breath to speak. Heavy chest and heavier air. It all felt so unnecessarily thick.

“Fine,” Coulson conceded. “Then here. Give this a look.”

He slid a file across his pristine desk, and Clint picked it up while he altered his mental list.

·       Answer Coulson’s questions

·       Accept mission to read over later

·       Sign counseling form

·       Bed

The folder was unmarked except for the tab on the top, which simply read “BLACK WIDOW.” He didn’t have much more energy for comprehension than that. He open the file, pretend to read over the cover sheet, and nodded his head.

“No problem, sir.”

“Barton,” Coulson said softly, but slowly. Clint caught the warning note and waiting in stillness for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Eventually, Coulson leaned back in his chair and dismissed Clint with a wave. “I’ll send you the form in the morning. Just get to bed.”

Even better.

“Sir,” Clint saluted, mostly ironically, and then he turned on his heel and left the room. He was lucky he was staying in the base hotel. That was the nice thing about San Antonio. Easy to hide SHIELD facilities somewhere crawling with every military organization known to man.

He didn’t remember much more after that before he was climbing between the scratchy sheets. He slipped away, gratefully, into sleep.

***

Waking was a surreal experience. He stared up at the concrete ceiling and wondered at himself. What a series of spectacularly bad decisions that had been. He should have crashed at a motel out in the city for a couple hours, before he came in. No one would have cared, and he could have been much closer to conscious for…Coulson.

He groaned and rolled over to plant his face into the pillow. Well, he’d fucked that one up spectacularly. He should go by and apologize. Better yet, he should think up a really good lie and dazzle the senior agent with a spectacular story that would get him out of all this trouble.

He turned his head to the side, to breathe better, and saw the manila file folder on the floor. He must have missed the end table when he’d tossed it last night.

Had it been last night? The sun had been up when he’d flashed his ID at the first security checkpoint. Speaking of which, someone really ought to talk to those guys about suspicious characters. He was pretty sure he’d had to physically hold onto the gate to stay upright, at one point.

He fished the file up off the floor and rolled over onto his back, looking at the blank paper. He contemplated the letters that had been carefully printed at the top, in sharpie and all-caps.

 

**BLACK WIDOW**

 

Then he rolled over and forced himself to get up and onto his feet. Whatever it was, he would deal with it later. Coulson hadn’t said anything about it being time sensitive, even though he had looked at him weird when he’d given it to him. He’d rather have a run and a shower first. It could wait another hour.

Except, Coulson _had_ been weird about the file. At the time, Clint had assumed it was barely-masked frustration with Clint’s continuing antics. However, looking back, it seemed more like Coulson had been trying to…warn him?

Clint looked down at the unassuming envelope. Then, with sudden resolve, he sat back down on the bed and flipped it open. He skipped the first page, intending to come back to it, and flipped to the second.

It was a photograph of a young girl. A grainy black-and-white headshot. She had on sunglasses and her hair curled around the ribbon that held it back. She looked about in her early teens, although the set of her mouth spoke to an older type of bitterness. He glanced at the date on the picture and counted back in his head.

So, the photo was old. Today, she was somewhere around her early to mid-twenties. And if they really didn’t have a more recent picture of her, she had to be something special.

Clint felt his stomach twist, and he flipped back to the first page, eyes flitting over the page.

**Mission Objective: Termination**

So there it was. Making the next question, why her? Not that he was going to find an actual answer to that written somewhere in the file. But he could probably find enough clues to put something satisfactory together. He flipped the file back shut and stood up again. He really wanted that run and a shower. Especially if it was going to be another week like this.

***

He’d barely made it a few miles before his curiosity had won out and he headed back to the hotel. He didn’t bother getting dressed after a cold shower, sitting at his desk with still wet hair and splayed legs.

He considered the file sitting across from him, reaching out to straighten it so it lay parallel along the desktop.

 

**BLACK WIDOW**

 

He leaned forward and opened the file carefully. This time, he read the first page. It was a standard overview, outlining the target’s affiliations and general skills. It was an impressive list. Although, a basic bullet point list didn’t do anything to qualify _how_ talented the girl was at each of the listed skills. He’d have to dig deeper into the file for that. He sighed, and began to pull apart the paperwork, settling it into piles and getting ready to go through it.

There wasn’t much, which wasn’t that usual. Someone like him didn’t need to know anything that wasn’t going to help him put an arrow through the target’s head. He was, however, finding out that that list hadn’t done her justice. The thickest document, by far, was her known kills list. And, like any good sniper, he knew that a _known_ kills list didn’t scratch the surface. Not if you were this good.

His eyes widened slightly at a few of the names, and he glanced over at the “known associates” list. There was no way that the KGB had been behind all of these. There had to have been someone pulling the strings of this particular assassin long before that.

Shit, this list went all the way back to his childhood. _Her_ childhood.

 

Red Room

 

He couldn’t have said what caught his eye on that particular document. Maybe it was just because its contents were so sparse. It was the last page in the file and he read it quickly.

_Mental destabilization...sexual training…serumic enhancements…emotional conditioning…learned helplessness._

He flipped back to the photo of the girl. Serumic enhancement? Like the Captain America shit from the 40s? Or the Banner disaster? This wasn’t an assassin. This was a weapon.

Worse than that, this was a suicide mission.

He’d known it since halfway through the file, but he hadn’t really understood it until he’d gone back to the photograph. He stared at the sunglasses, imagining the eyes behind them. The file had said red hair, so he added that to the image in his mind’s eye.

Coulson had been warning him. Suicide mission.

He closed the folder and leaned back in his chair. This mission was above his pay grade. This girl was above his skill level. This wasn’t a mission meant to give him one last chance. This was “come back with your shield or on it.” This was clean disposal of toxic waste.

He’d only cleared as a full SHIELD Agent two months ago.

He shoved the folder away, and it whispered as it slid across the desk and then hit the wall with a soft tap.

Well, only one thing to do.

He stood up and dug his cellphone out of where he’d discarded his uniform in the bathroom. He hit a few buttons and then put it to his ear. He caught his own eye, suddenly, in the mirror, and stared at himself as the phone rang. He ran his eyes down his naked body, automatically inspecting for bruises or more concerning issues. The bruises he certainly had, but nothing else seemed out of place. He moved his gaze back up to his own eyes.

His hair had dried, and his newly-clean-shaven face stared back serenely. As if it were asking, “where are you going?”

“To hell,” he told his reflection, and then redirected his attention to the phone as the call’s recipient picked up.

“Josh!” he greeted enthusiastically. You still in San Antonio? You are? That’s great, because I just got in last night, and I need a night out on the town, you know? It’s been one of those weeks. Who else is in town?”

He laughed suddenly, and then realized he’d gone back to staring at his own reflection. He forced his eyes away and focused on the grout of the shower.

“Oh, god, don’t invite Keith. I’m not looking for _that_ kind of a night. What about Ryan and Mike?”

A pause, and then he took a slow breath.

“No, I hadn’t heard about that. Shame. He was a good man.”

He laughed.

“Yeah ok, maybe not a good man, but a good soldier. You know what I meant. Well, you call Ryan then, and get your ass ready. I’ll meet you at the Riverwalk in a few hours. What’s that? Sure yeah, bring Vicky, I don’t give a fuck. See ya man.”

He ended the call and glanced up. Somehow he’d ended up looking at his own reflection again.

“What do you want?” he asked wearily.

But nobody seemed forthcoming with an answer.

***

Four hours later, and only halfway to shitfaced, Clint ordered another round. He glanced over his shoulder to where Vicky and Josh were taking turns with a redhead squished between them.

He turned back to the bartender and asked for another, as well as a pint, as he downed the shot. Gods, it took so much alcohol to get him to stop thinking these days. That was probably some kind of a warning sign. Not than it mattered anymore.

Suicide mission.

He poured the second shot, when it was handed to him, straight into his beer. He’d long ago passed the point of being able to taste anything.

He turned around on the barstool, beer clutched in both hands, and tried to find someone in the crowd he knew. Ryan had disappeared with some chick barely an hour after they’d gotten there. Brad, some guy that Ryan had brought, had to be around somewhere.

Clint spotted him and made to stand up, but faltered and sat back down when he saw that Brad was was... _otherwise_ engaged. And with a guy, too. Well shit, if Brad had said he swung that way, Clint might have been down. It was that kind of a night.

Suicide mission.

He returned his attention to his beer and was surprised to notice a woman had sat herself down next to him. He must finally be getting close enough to drunk if he hadn’t noticed that.

“Hey,” he greeted, hoping he was still conscious enough to be intelligible. He put the beer-plus-tequila-shot on the counter and directed his attention to the girl. Or rather, to her painfully tight dress.

He’d always been a little impressed at people in those kinds of outfits. How did they move and talk and shit. It was a fucking talent.

He realized, belatedly, that he’d said that out loud. Fortunately, the girl seemed to find it charming and they smiled at each other.

She leaned across and shouted over the din, “Let’s get out of here?”

Clint laughed at the straightforwardness of it all. He looked at the girl again.

Suicide mission.

“What are you, sixteen?” he scoffed, eyebrows raised. He wasn’t _that_ drunk.

She laughed though, too, and slipped her ID out of her purse, holding it in front of Clint’s line of vision. He had to try a couple of times to get it in focus, but he managed eventually. It didn’t help though, since he couldn’t seem to find the ID.

Oh. It wasn’t a driver’s license, it was a military ID. That was the problem with San Antonio. You throw a stone and you’ve either hit a military base or a veteran.

So yeah, she was definitely over 18, but she was an E-3. Fraternization. Even though SHIELD didn’t fit within the U.S. military, it didn’t sit well within his stomach. Or maybe that was the Guinness and tequila.

Either way, he’d suddenly lost his appetite, in more ways than one.

Suicide mission.

“Sorry, love,” he told her. “I outrank you.” Not completely true, strictly speaking, but it was close enough. Startled, she put her ID back in her purse and stood up. He thought for a minute she was going to salute him or something, but then she just walked away.

He picked his drink back up again and chugged it as he flagged down the bartender. It was the last thing he remembered of the night.

***

When he woke, he sat up with a jerk and leapt over the back of the couch. He landed on all fours, watched the floor spin on its axis, and promptly vomited.

“Hey, Barton, you’re safe,” a voice called to him from across the room. “It’s just my apartment. No one knew where you were staying, so I had to bring you here.”

It was Josh. Which meant it was a good bet that this was Josh’s apartment.

Clint took a few deep breaths and tried to spit the taste of vomit out of his mouth.

“Sorry about that,” he said, gesturing to the mess and Josh came around the back of the couch. “Where’s your cleaning stuff?”

“Under the sink,” Josh answered, and Clint got to his feet. It was a struggle, but he got there.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be around chemicals right now, huh?” Josh said carefully, but Clint shook his head. He and Josh were drinking-buddies friends. Not friend-friends. Waking up on his couch was weird enough. He wanted to clear things up before shit got awkward.

Which made him wonder.

“So,” he ventured. “How was last night?” He made sure to breathe carefully as he dug Lysol and paper towels out from under the sink. He tucked them under his arm and then grabbed the lip of the trashcan to drag it behind him.

It didn’t go unnoticed that Josh hadn’t said anything. He shuffled his way back to his own vomit, plastic trashcan scraping across the floor as he went.

“That bad?” he asked.

“Nah,” Josh dismissed, but Clint could see the subtle twist to his mouth.

“Just tell me what I did, Josh, and I’ll try to fix it.”

“Broke my bathroom mirror,” Josh shrugged.

Clint paused in his trek across the living room and looked at Josh carefully. “I _fought_ you?” That was a new one. He did a lot of things while drunk, but he’d always had a grim satisfaction that, unlike his father, violence had never been included.

“Nah, it wasn’t like that,” Josh reassured him. “You’d finished puking your guts up into the toilet, and you stood up and caught sight of yourself in the mirror. Stared real hard for a while. Guess you didn’t like what you saw, because you punched it pretty hard.”

Clint looked down at his hand, and the taped lacerations finally got his mind’s attention.

“Shit,” Clint whistled. “Sorry about that.”

“Mm-hm.”

He got down on his hands and knees and started taking care of his mess. “Where did Vicky and Co. end up?”

“They headed back to Vicky’s place or something. I don’t know. I was worried about you.”

That. That right there was a line in the sand. Drinking buddies – men he trusted to have his back in the field – that was fine. _This_ needed to be shut down right now.

He put on a big sloppy grin and looked up. “Why? Cause I had a little too much fun? Man, I warned you that I needed a night on the town. Granted,” he gestured at the floor, “I went a little overboard. My bad. I haven’t had a chance to drink in a while. Must have misjudged my limits.”

“Mm-hm,” Josh hummed again.

Clint sprayed the floor aggressively with the Lysol. “I’m sorry about your night, though. Gonna lose my wingman reputation if I cock block like that. I’ll make it up to you. And I’ll cover the cost of the mirror of course.” The Lysol was making his headache worse, but he wiped it up dutifully with another paper towel.

Suicide mission.

Shit, he’d almost forgotten.

Clint decided not to say anything else until he’d finished up. He ran one more paper towel over the floor, and then stood up, dragging the trashcan back to its place, and then he carefully washed his hands.

Finally, he turned back to face Josh, who hadn’t moved from where he was leaning up against the wall, watching Clint with a blank expression. Clint matched the posture, leaning back against the edge of the sink.

“Look, Josh. I had a really bad week. I did set out to get drunk, and you’ve got me, that probably wasn’t wise. But I really just misjudged my tolerance after being off the stuff for the last few months. Thanks for looking out for me. And thanks for being…invested enough to actually make a point of this. I’m sorry I put you out.”

Clint Barton. King of the Bullshit.

Suicide mission.

Josh finally relaxed his position against the wall, reaching up to run one hand back and forth across his buzz cut.

“It wasn’t too much put out,” he grinned suddenly. “Tracy, that’s that girl’s name, she seemed pretty impressed with how concerned I was about you anyway. Vicky says she brought me up at least twice. If Vicky liked her, I’ll probably get another chance.” He sighed heavily. “Sorry you had a rough week.”

“Goes with the job. Now, are we gonna get a pizza or what?”

“After you just blew chunks like that? Are you nuts?”

“I have to get something in my stomach ok? That’s how this works. My body is a mystery, but it knows what it wants.”

He didn’t have to report for a face-to-face briefing until 1700. Plenty of time to stick around and goof off. Remind everyone that Clint Barton was the master of antics. Maybe he’d find a way to climb up on the roof and make a game out of seeing how far out he could identify distinguishing facial features on the people below.

“Order a pizza. I’ll buy.”

“Well, if you’re buying,” Josh scoffed. “It’s your body, I guess.”

“I’ll get the Xbox turned on. Don’t get anything stupid, like vegetables. Vegetables don’t belong on pizza.”

“You’re not allowed to play COD in this apartment, Barton,” Josh called as he dialed. “You just whine about the sniper guns and talk about how far you can actually make shots from.”

“You got GTA V?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s troll some twelve year olds.”

***

Four hours, thirty-seven angry preteens, and one drive later, Clint found himself in the suicide mission briefing. It was just him and some suit who probably had had eighty meetings that day alone and didn’t give a shit whether or not Clint was paying attention.

Clint was paying attention.

If this was the last face he was going to see, he was damn well going to know it as much as he could. He studied the curve of her jaw and the set of her lips. He wished the sunglasses were off. Wished they had a voice clip.

He listened to an overview of the mission parameters, and confirmed the address of his position. They drilled timing and angles and extraction. Eventually, the repertoire wound down to its close.

“Hey, who’s the guy in my ear for this one?”

“Agent Coulson is taking this one himself,” the man said, looking interested for the first time since Clint had seen him. “Must have a vested interest in this one. So, good luck, I guess.”

“Thanks,” Clint responded quietly.

Of course Coulson would interfere like this. Of course Coulson couldn’t just let well enough alone and let Clint go to his death like a normal fucking soldier. Of course he’d butt in and want to be there at the end.

Clint whipped his phone out and dialed. He spoke sharply as soon as the ringing stopped.

“You don’t have to on comm!”

“Barton,” Coulson soothed, but Clint kept right on talking.

“I’m not your responsibility. I know you took a risk bringing me in instead of letting me rot in prison, and I’m sorry it didn’t pay off. And thanks for the shot, I guess. It was worth a try. But you don’t need to follow everything through. You don’t need to see this to completion. Delegate for once in your _goddamn_ _life_. You don’t need this nightmare added to your list.”

There was silence on the other end, and then Coulson took a deep breath.

Clint barreled on.

“Look, if you won’t do it for you, then do it for me. Maybe if you’re not there, I can make some different choices.”

This was being mean, he knew. Giving Coulson the hope that Clint might just up and disappear. Clint had no intentions of doing anything of the sort, but if Coulson thought he might...well, then at least Clint wouldn’t have to make the only person in the world who gave a shit about him listen to him die.

Clint chickened out and ended the call before Coulson could say anything. When his phone rang, a few moments later, he put it on silent. He left it silent all the way through getting his gear issued, and filling up his quiver. He left it silent while he got on the plan, and while it flew.

Silence is the worst part of a person. It hides all the ways they have to hurt.

When the plane landed, he contemplated the earpiece in his hand, before he fit it into his ear.

“Hawkeye, do you copy? This is Agent Rochester, and I’ll have a handle on your mission today. We haven’t worked together before, but don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you.”

Not Coulson.

Clint breathed deeply for the first time in two days.

“Nice to meet you, sir. And you’re coming in loud and clear.” He stood and walked calmly off the plane, nodding his thanks to the pilot. The pilot, who would be returning home at this end of _his_ assignment.

“Then let’s get this show on the road,” Rochester laughed.

And what a show it was going to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [hawknat](http://hawknat.tumblr.com/), who has been a great cheerleader and an avid editor. Thanks to [nathanielbarton](http://nathanielbarton.tumblr.com/) and [spectralarchers](http://spectralarchers.tumblr.com/) who came up with the prompt that led to this disaster.
> 
> Find my [tumblr](http://polyamoryavengers.tumblr.com/) for updates and Marvel oneshots.


	2. Smoke

Clint stretched out on his stomach along the sandstone rooftop. He tilted his head carefully, peering down and across the lip of the rooftop. It was a three story building, which wasn’t nearly as tall as he’d like, but he wasn’t really about to be picky. Not for this.

They weren’t actually running the mission. He didn’t even have anything other than his bow, quiver, and radio. Like with most missions of this nature, SHIELD wanted Clint to check out the location and get a feel for it. Make sure it would serve his purpose. Give the boots-on-the-ground Agent a chance to see potential disasters that the recon team had missed.

Which was, today, outright hilarious.

But he wasn’t going down without a fight. Whichever part of his body that housed his stubbornness was out in full force. The dread of the upcoming mission had settled into a dull weight on his chest, but he went through the prep work as meticulously as he would have for any other mission. He wasn’t going gently into the night. Not by a long shot.

And that thought was what made him get up and move. He jerked himself up off the rough roof and scrambled to his feet.

A long shot. Because that was his job. He made long shots. And the pretty Widow made slits in skin from where she stood right behind you.

 _Be paranoid_ , he ordered himself. _If there’s ever a moment, this is it._

“I’m gonna loop,” Clint announced to his earpiece, and then he darted out across the roof. He reached the opposite edge and grasped it, lowering himself so he hung from his arms.

“You’re doing what?” Rochester asked. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Clint answered, letting go. He fell a half-story and caught himself on the ledge of the window beneath him.

He leaned out over the street beneath him and planted one foot firmly against the wall he was hanging from. He used the position to jump off from the wall and get a hold of the building across the way. This one was much taller, and he scaled it with a thin smile on his face.

“Hawkeye, you’re drawing a lot of attention to yourself.”

“Yeah,” Clint commented back unhelpfully.

“I’m trying to work with you here.”

“I know! I’m trying to work back.”

And maybe Coulson had said something. Or maybe the guy wasn’t stupid, and he knew what kind of a missions this was. Or maybe he just felt like cutting Clint some slack. Either way, he let the matter go.

Fortunately, the early hour meant that there was only a small audience to witness his acrobatics. And parkour’s rise to popularity meant people rarely pointed at rushing shadowy figures and cried “vigilante!” anymore these days.

The roof he’d pulled himself up onto was a part of a multi-level structure, and he continued to rush forward, pulling himself up via windows and drainpipes. Whatever it took to get a little higher. From there, he jumped to the next roof, trying to keep up his momentum.

_Move, move, move._

Thank God for European fire laws. Or the lack thereof. Shit like this was impossible, even in most downtown American cities. The spaces were too wide. And the suburbs? Forget it. You were gonna die before you so much as reached a tree, much less a house.

“Hawkeye, please tell me what you’re doing,” Rochester sighed. He seemed tired. It hadn’t even been an order.

“I’m abandoning my position.”

“Why?”

Clint dropped down to street level again, rushed across the major thoroughfare, and leapt up to grab the edge of the next building. He didn’t respond, letting his rough breathing and faint sounds an exertion answer for him.

“You’re just going in a giant circle,” Rochester warned him. “You keep going like this and you’re just going to come back to where you were a few minutes ago.”

Clint waited for the shoe to drop.

When Rochester spoke again, it was with a sharper tone and a quicker speed.

“You think she’s there. You think she’s there _now_? We’re just on recon. She isn’t even scheduled to be in the country until Thursday. That’s four days. What makes you think she’d be there now?”

“Because I’m here,” Clint answered. He had eyes on where he’d been lying a few minutes ago, except now he was higher up and further back. “You don’t get to be as good as she is by reacting. You get to be like that by anticipating. How many years have you been hunting her?”

Silence from the other line.

“That photo is at least five years out of date,” Clint snapped. “ _At least_. How long have you been hunting her?”

“Eight years.” The answer is a quiet surrender.

“Eight years,” Clint repeated. “Eight years and who knows how many agents, and you have one photo and a list of names. You have a possible half-idea for her origin. You don’t even have a real name.”

“She might not have one.”

That, unexpectedly, hurt him. Like a soft sting. A tiny wound that has already faded away into a lingering ache by the time you think to look for its source.

“It doesn’t matter, sir,” he said anyway. “It really doesn’t. When you’re outnumbered, you play defense. That’s just the way it goes. So I’m going to play defense.”

He stopped then, because there was a movement of a shadow on the roof. A curve where there shouldn’t have been a curve, and then it was suddenly gone.

“Oh my god,” Clint breathed. “She’s here.”

If he’d stayed there a minute more, he’d have already been dead. Slit open from behind while he played at being a sniper, assuming his target would arrive on his schedule, rather than her own.

“Hawkeye,” Rochester said, but then seemed to pause, as though he knew something needed to be done, but even he didn’t quite know what.

It was one thing to know that everyone expected him to die here. It was another to have it confirmed by the complete lack of preparation on the other end of the line. No orders were forthcoming.

Except he didn’t need orders.

**Missions Objective: Termination**

He already had them.

The arrow was on his string before he fully thought the action through. He wasn’t entirely sure where she was, because she was behind part of another building, but that meant she _had_ to come into view. If he couldn’t see, then she couldn’t either. She had to check the whole roof.

The moment he saw the edge of her body, he felt a twinge of guilt. Unexpected, but not entirely out of place. It was like opening up a game against a first time chess player. They have no strategy, and are thus entirely impossible to predict.

Clint sat here, with an arrow trained on the girl, and the only reason was because she was so good. Clint hadn’t actually predicted her movements. He hadn’t actually outplayed her. He’d just assumed she would be good enough to be ahead of him.

He didn’t know how she’d done it. He hadn’t solved a puzzle. He hadn’t controlled the board. And yet here he sat, holding her in a kind of checkmate.

It didn’t stop him from loosing the arrow. It flew, hurtling through the air at the back of her head.

“Hawkeye! What is going on?” Rochester spoke just as the girl pulled her body back behind the edge of the building. The arrow skimmed past her and across the street, to bury itself in the side of another building.

A white dread rushed Clint. There was no way she’d known he was there. Serumic enhancements be damned, she’d fucking started to move _before_ he’d shot. She must have sensed it somehow. Just known, without seeing or hearing.

And now she knew where he was.

He had another arrow on his string.

Why? And, more importantly, when? He didn’t even remember reaching back to grab another.

He was just standing there, forlorn on the rooftop.

“I thought I had a shot,” Clint finally answered Rochester. “But I guess I never did.”

She was coming at him for sure. Just because he’d lost her didn’t mean she’d lost him. In fact, he was just standing there. Just standing there like a fucking idiot, waiting for her to come at him. She was more assassin than sniper, but it didn’t matter at distances like these.

And he just kept standing there. Dumbest move in history.

And the only one she wasn’t expecting.

Clint got his first look at Natalia Alianova Romanova, although he wouldn’t come to know the name until later. She came around a corner into his field of vision, already much closer than he anticipated. She was moving fast and efficiently enough that, instead of running through the turn, she stopped and crouched down, letting herself slide along the gravel covering the rooftop.

It was an efficient move, yes. But a little hard to take back.

She saw him immediately. It wasn’t like he was hard to miss. However, with her momentum and her angle, she couldn’t change directions. Clint already had the bow up and drawn. He loosed it just as she let her feet splay, purposefully losing her balance.

She hit the gravel hard, rolling several times, but the trajectory was true enough that she didn’t escape unscathed. The arrow pierced through the center of her right thigh, just above the knee.

It was too far away for him to hear her, but he knew what it sounded like to have something ripping through your leg. He’d hit pretty dead center. He might have ripped through the quadriceps tendon.

He suddenly became aware that Rochester was yelling at him. Straight up yelling.

“She’s down,” Clint announced breathlessly, interrupting the handler, he was drawing another arrow already.

The sudden stillness in response made him want to run all the way back to SHIELD and rub this moment in everyone’s face. Remind them all that Clint had pulled himself out of worse situations. That he thrived under adversity. That he had just won a victory in a battle because…

…of sheer dumb luck.

The elation fled as quickly as it had come. The low dread worsened when he saw her roll over the edge of the roof and disappear from his line of sight. He hadn’t been quick enough with his hands.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t quick enough with his feet. She had an arrow through her goddamn leg. How quickly could she really move?

He surged forward, leaping off the building and down onto the next one.

“Hawkeye, pull back,” Rochester ordered.

Clint didn’t stop moving. He went in a straight line, because this was about speed now. He’d just outplayed her and _she_ didn’t know it was all luck. She thought he was an equal adversary. She th—

 _She_ landed on him from behind and above.

Painfully, he wasn’t even surprised. Sure, he hadn’t expected her decision to be what his own had been – get the high ground and loop back around to your starting point. However, of course her play would be for close quarters combat. This was where Clint would end up with a knife in his throat.

A brief surge of panicked anger gave him the strength to take the last couple steps, in spite of her dragging weight. He guessed that the tendon hadn’t been severed after all.

“Hawkeye! Get your ass out of there. _Tell_ me that you’re not engaging the target! I don’t have–” Rochester cut off suddenly and was replaced by another voice.

Clint didn’t hear what it said, because that was when he used the girl’s weight, along with their combined unbalance, to throw himself off the roof.

_My god. How many buildings can I fall off in one week?_

She let him go, choosing to instead grab the edge of the building and dangle three stories up. As she released her hold on him, Clint kept falling.

He tried to orientate himself, but didn’t really have the time. He hit the pavement in a two-part collisions, felt his ankle twist hard and at last one rib snap in succession, and then the breath was completely knocked out of his body.

He expected her to fall, for a moment, and then remembered he’d shot her. She couldn’t just fall. Although that did beg the question, why hadn’t she shot him? He doubted she needed two hands to do it.

They stared at each other.

There was blood dripping down her leg and _pat-pat-patting_ to the pavement below. The sounds of the world waking around them were suddenly painfully clear. He saw a bird fly over the two of them. The clouds were fucking beautiful.

And her _eyes_. Gods. Her eyes. A child’s eyes, trying to absorb the whole world before it absorbed her.

Maybe she was actually frightened. Maybe, through his series of stilled attempts at self-preservation, he’d actually thrown her off enough to be cautious. Maybe she’d begun to handle him softly, like a snake she’d just realized was poisonous after all.

And then his body finally cooperated enough to let him breathe in, and the silence was broken by his stuttering gasp. Breath in, breath out- _in. Breath in breath in breath in._

He sucked air greedily and loudly, but not so loudly that he couldn’t hear her scream down at him.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

And Clint, tired and bruised and bleeding from somewhere, just laid on his back, and shrugged up at her.

The moment was broken when the new man in his ear yelled the same thing the Black Widow just had.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

It was enough to shake Clint out of the moment. He scrambled to get to his feet, and the girl, galvanized by his movement, pulled herself back up onto the roof and out of Clint’s sight.

“I’m in pursuit of the target,” Clint answered innocently. He hop-spun around to look behind him. The tiny bread shop was closed, with a large glass window. Which was unlucky for the owner.

“You were told not to pursue. There’s a team on its way.”

“Is there now?” Clint said, pleasantly enough. He balanced on his good foot, drew, and aimed. He could see his own reflection, holding the horrible form and staring back at him. He centered the arrow’s trajectory over his reflection’s forehead, and then he fired.

The glass shattered with a satisfying finality.

“Hawkeye!” the man shouted, and then didn’t say anything else. Clint could hear the chaos going on in the background. Clearly the people in the room had moved into a hustle.

Less than ten minutes ago the world had been still and silent, and Clint had been ready to die. The men on the other line had been willing to let him.

The anger helped him across the street and through the shattered window. He got a sliced palm for his trouble, and the blaring alarm in the bakery hurt his ears, but he kept going. The stairs he’d been looking for were easy to find. Climbing them was less so, but the adrenaline and the pulsing heat in his mind and body drove him upwards.

At least he could win a fight against a staircase.

The rest of it would remain to be seen. If nothing else, being the one who held the high ground would once again be to his advantage.

“Hawkeye,” the man said again, and this time he seemed much calmer. “I’m ordering you to fall back. There’s a team on its way. Actually, there are several teams on their way and I th–”

“How long?” Clint interrupted.

“Fifteen minutes.”

Clint laughed roughly, as he emerged at the top of the staircase and located the outer door. That was another great thing about Europe. Roof access was totally a _thing._ It wouldn’t even require acrobatic antics.

“Fifteen minutes?” Clint mocked. He hobbled to the edge of the roof and let the low wall press into his hips and hold him up and he drew his bow again. This time, with a different kind of arrow on the string. If she was really – finally – retreating, then she’d need a car. And normal arrows didn’t help much with cars.

“It’s the best we can do. We’re having trouble getting in contact with the main facilities. No one expected this. We’re not prepared.”

“You sent an agent after an assassin, and you weren’t prepared for them to encounter each other?”

It was a rhetorical question. Clint asked more out of curiosity to hear how the man would respond to the silent accusation.

Silence hides man’s ability to hurt.

Clint traced the streets through the sights on his bow, peering through the windows and windshields.

He was almost surprised to spot her, driving carefully and unobtrusively, down the street. She had probably assumed he couldn’t see her through the tinted glass.

But that was the one thing Clint _did_ have complete confidence in. Bar completely solid objects, if he was looking, he could see. And cars, unlike people, cannot collapse and flip over themselves in order to avoid an arrow.

The projectile hit the pavement just underneath the car, and then exploded. Large, uncontrolled, loud…pretty much everything a sniper shouldn’t be. He slung his bow back around his chest and leaned to rest on the half-wall. Watching patiently, he waited for her to crawl out of the wreckage.

It wasn’t an anxious wait, but rather an inevitable one. Killing time while she drew herself together.

He should send another arrow. One explosion had done the damage it was going to. Another didn’t really matter at this point. He should fire another down and finish the job. He should fire three or four or seven. He should reduce the flipped vehicle to twisted metal and burning fluids.

He could see the headline in his mind. “Unending Series of Explosions Devastates Sleeping Town” or something like that.

He kept waiting.

The man on the comm, however, did not.

“What did you do?” he asked. Quiet and low. Somehow, that finally got Clint’s full attention. This was no longer a fight between Clint and a handler. It was something bigger. It needed people to spin the story and teams to sweep the area. It needed alerts put out to other Agents about the inevitable heightened security in the country. It needed more than had been prepped.

Was this how spectacularly they had expected him to fail? That they had nothing?

Suddenly, alarms went off in the background, still over the comms. He heard the bustle intensify, and suddenly realized what it must be.

If SHIELD had been hunting the Black Widow for as long as they’d said, every camera they had access to must be on the lookout for her. And Clint had just dragged her around a square mile and then flipped her car in the middle of a thoroughfare. Sure, they were in the warehouse district, but apparently it had been enough. A camera somewhere had caught her face, and it was setting off every alarm SHIELD had.

“You wanted a picture, sir,” Clint said, voice dripping with the irony. “I guess you got it. And those alarms will probably help you get anyone on the phone. Hell, you could probably call the Director himself, and he’d pick up at this point.”

“You think there won’t be consequences for this?” the man snapped, and Clint’s eyes were suddenly drawn to the flaming wreckage.

She was climbing out.

He turned to hobble his way back down the stairs.

“With all due respect, sir,” he sighed. “Please enlighten me as to what comes after execution? I’m not really sure what you guys have left to throw at me. Besides, if I’m not mistaken, I’ve just incapacitated one of your ghosts. Punishing me seems rude, at this point.”

The ghost list was a legend, as was most information passed around in SHIELD break rooms, but it was one that Clint actually believed. A list of aliases of the people that probably didn’t actually exist, but still seemed to wreak havoc across the world anyway.

If such a list existed, then the girl had to be on it.

Clint doubted that it was the kind of list that had names crossed off it very often. If he survived, he should get a medal or something. Before they sat him down for his lethal injection.

When the silence on the other end stretched on, he reached up and turned the comm off. They didn’t have anything to tell him that he didn’t already know.

He was angry. He wasn’t quite sure how or why, but he was absolutely seething with bitter aggression. It was crawling under his skin and pushing against the back of his eyes. It was painful and deeply concerning.

However, as he crossed the street just in time to watch the Black Widow disappear into one of the warehouses, he was more startled to realize _why_ he was angry.

_It’s not fair._

SHIELD has ordered him to his death – or, they’d tried to anyway. But they’d also ordered this girl to hers. And yeah, she was clearly dangerous. And yeah, she had done a lot of damage. And yeah, she’d done enough damage that she might never be able to make up for it.

But he couldn’t get her eyes out of his head. He could stop thinking about that silent moment, lying on his back and looking up at her.

Because it had been silence between them. And for the first time in his life, it hadn’t scared him.

She’d yelled at him, from her perch up on the wall, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Clint answered now, murmuring under his breath, “I’m going to hell.”

He climbed inside the warehouse, and shut the door behind him. She must have hit her head pretty hard, or else just wasn’t thinking clearly. This wasn’t the kind of warehouse with a backdoor. This was a storage facility. She was pretty much trapped here.

He took a few minutes to drag a pallet in front of the door, which would at least keep the inevitable crowd of citizens from entering. It might also slow her down a little, if she tried to get out around behind him.

He began to follow the trail of blood, and was suddenly reminded of the children’s nursery rhyme, the Itsy-Bitsy Spider. He whispered the words, low under his breath, still simmering with anger.

Some bastards out there had taken a lonely and vulnerable child and told her that the only way she’d earn a right to exist in this world was if she did everything they told her. And then, when she’d come to believe and trust them, they’d ripped her apart. Her blood had dripped a trail to her current character just as it now dripped a trail to her current location.

_I’m not going to kill her._

The thought was in his head before he saw it coming. It wasn’t a resolve or a promise, but a fact. An inevitability. The consequence of a collision.

Two objects, hurtling toward each other in space. When they collide, they have no say in their new direction. It has already been decided by their speed and position in time and space. It was set in law before they ever knew the moment would come.

_She is not going to kill me._

That one was more startling, but no less sure.

The only task left, then, was to convince her of the same. And somehow, looking at the perfection of it all, he wholly believed that it would be easy. When truth was this deep and forceful, how could it be ignored?

That was the moment the bullet ripped through Clint’s right arm.

He’d heard the shot and the _ping_ somewhere off to his right, and realized what it meant a moment too late. She’d ricocheted a bullet off the metal beams. She couldn’t even see him, and she’d managed to get a hit.

He pitched to the side with a cry and a curse. The anger surged again, outweighing the truth of a moment before. The wound had been mostly flesh, missing bone and major arteries, but it still hurt, and it still pissed him off.

“Hey!” he shouted. At least he knew where she was now. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d cornered herself down a closed off aisle.

Her only way out was through him.

“You wanna play like that?” he continued shouting. He leaned up against a stack of boxes just before the final turn. A few more steps and they’d be in each other’s sights. “Sucks for you, because I’m left handed! I can still throw shit at you!”

He reached back, snagged an arrow, and threw it around the corner. Not like a dart, but like a piece of paper, catching the wind resistance and falling straight to the floor. It clattered for a moment, and then rolled slowly.

_You will not kill me._

He threw another arrow, listening to it clatter uselessly across the floor. Then another, and another, and suddenly he was too impatient with the whole thing. He began yanking the arrows out by handfuls, and somehow the sound of them across the concrete floor was deafening.

Eventually he just gave up and unhooked the quiver, lobbing the whole thing out in front of her. It hit the floor with a crash.

He wondered what she was thinking. Clint assumed she was confused. Hell, _he_ was confused. But she wasn’t asking any questions, or making any comments.

_You will not kill me._

He moved on to his gloves, peeling them off carefully, tossing them, and watching them flutter to the ground. He laid his bow carefully beside him, and unhooked the rest of his gear from his legs and waist. Those went out onto the growing pile as well.

Then his shirt, which he peeled off over his head. He was sweaty and bloody and the uncompromising fabric stuck to his skin. He wriggled, gasped at the pain his shifting weight shocked through his ankle, gritted his teeth as he was forced to rotate his shoulder, and finally pulled free.

God it hurt to breath that hard with a cracked rib. As he stripped himself raw, he began to feel his injuries, as though he was unwrapping his sustaining anger with the rest of his things. With the rest of his identity.

“You want it?” he shouted. The anger was gone from his voice, and even he was surprised by how calm he sounded. “You want it? Take it. Take everything.”

_You will not kill me._

The pants were a little harder, so he just went ahead and took the boxers off with them. Easier than doing the same job twice. Everything got tangled around his shoes, since he’d gotten ahead of himself, but eventually those came off, too.

Finally, everything had gone over into the opening that the Black Widow was inevitably staring down. He could imagine her, ten or twenty feet back, watching everything fly out in front of her.

She was probably on her last legs, if she was standing at all. Maybe she was sitting. He changed the image in his head to her on the floor, leaning back against the wall of shelves behind her. She’d still be aiming that gun, though. That, he was sure about.

He’d hesitated over his bow, but not for long. No sense in keeping anything for sentiment’s sake. He even took the silenced earpiece and threw that, too.

“I have nothing!” he called. “There’s nothing left.”

Silence.

It didn’t hurt him. He could feel his steady heartbeat. There were no decisions to be made here. His naked skin was still dripping sweat, and he realized it was probably very hot in the warehouse. He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything other than _this_. He stared at the pile of discarded items in front of him.

“If I come around the corner, are you going to shoot me?”

None of it mattered now anyway. Everything was so far out of his control, at this point. Maybe it always had been. Maybe everything he was had been created for this moment.

 

he’d been headed here                                                            she’d been headed here

this was his climax                              this was her climax

          he could feel the pull       she could feel the pull

 

Her gun flew out from where Clint knew she was standing. It landed with a dull thud on the pile of his clothes. An answer within the silence.

 

           This was their collision.

 

 


	3. Footprints

The heartbeat before he came around the corner was a long one. He knew he was moving. He could feel the muscles in his thighs contracting and relaxing. Yet, nothing seemed to happen.

And then time skipped, and he was standing in front of her. He’d been right about the sitting thing. She had her injured leg splayed out in front of her. Clint could see that she’d broken off most of the arrow, but the shaft remained in her muscle. Her uninjured leg was folded up so her knee was at her chin, acting as a shield for her torso.

She looked like shit. Her wound was bleeding at an alarming rate, as was a nasty cut on her temple. Part of her sleeve had been burned away, and her arm was already blistered from the heat of the explosion. Her eyes were clear though, tracking him despite the bruising that threatened to swell one of them shut.

She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

She didn’t seem thrown off by his nakedness, nor his intense scrutiny. Instead, she watched him wearily as he padded over, barefoot on the damp concrete.

He leaned heavily against the same stack of shelves she was, and slid down them to sit next to her, wincing when his balls hit the cold floor. He shifted his position, grinning slightly at the pain leaking through his body.

“Turned my ankle,” he told her, and she scoffed. It echoed in the wide room.

“It’s not broken. You’ll be fine. Although, you did break some ribs, if your breathing is any indication.”

He laughed at that, leaning his head back against the boxes, letting the noise die off into a cough and then a whimper.

“Nice shot, by the way,” he added. An afterthought.

She glanced at the shoulder and shrugged. “Close isn’t good enough. You know that.”

He had nothing to argue with there, and waited until she spoke again.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting in a warehouse,” he announced. “Staring at some stuff I threw on the ground. All while holding a conversation with my new friend. I’m good at multi-tasking.”

“Friend?” she mocked. “From how good you were out there, I assumed you didn’t have such tainting concepts in your vocabulary.”

He let that one go, too, listening carefully to the growing commotion outside.

“I think they’re going to shoot us,” he said. “When they come in.”

“Whatever,” she sighed, leaning her head back, as well.

Clint agreed with a low hum.

They sat in silence for a while after that. They breathed through it, unable to keep from identifying the sounds of the impending breach. It was too ingrained in their reflexes.

“Aren’t you one of them?” she asked suddenly.

“Well, my weapon and my earpiece are over there with your gun. So maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” she echoed. But it wasn’t a confirmation. Rather she was trying the words out in her mouth.

The hesitation in her voice made Clint laugh at a sudden intrusive thought.

“Or maybe,” he snickered. “Maybe I’m not the one who’s abandoning their post. Maybe it’s you, huh? Wanna join my team?”

After the day he’d just had, the very sound of it was ridiculous. However, when he turned toward her, waiting for her snarky comment, she was staring straight ahead with pursed lips and unblinking eyes.

“Black Widow,” Clint said, hesitantly.

“Natalia,” she said, and then visibly shuddered.

Clint licked his lips slowly. They tasted like salt and blood. “Did you…did you just give me your name? Your real name?”

“Does it matter?” she snapped, gesturing angrily at the breach. They could already hear running boots. They had maybe ten seconds.

Ten seconds for him – the word fumbler – to say something groundbreaking. Something that would drag them into the light.

His mind turned blank and all that came out was, “Clint. Clint Barton.”

And then a swarm of full body armor came around the corner in a mass sweeping formation. It was impressive, really, how they didn’t hesitate to risk being the first into the line of fire.

When they did get their targets in sight, however, everything ground to a halt. Whatever they’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. There was a moment of peace, where no one knew what to do next, and no one seemed to know who to ask.

“Don’t move,” someone shouted necessarily, and then the quiet shuffling was back.

“Hawkeye? Report!” someone else finally yelled. And Clint raised his arms over his head and grinned. Cocky and at the end of his line.

“We surrender?”

It broke the dam.

The formation rushed forward with a unity that was almost breathtaking. Clint saw Natalia tense, reconsider, and relax. Then the small army was upon them. Clint felt rough hands on his arms and shoulders, throwing him to the ground. He cried out at the rough treatment of his still bleeding wound, but didn’t say anything. He heard the soft huff of breath that was Natalia getting the same treatment.

Then the black bag was over his head, and his senses were muffled. He did, however, still hear one of the men standing above him say to another, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Shut up,” snapped whoever he’d spoken to, and that was the end of the conversation. Clint had nothing to focus on except the weight of his body, pressing in a line against the grimy cold floor.

He was lifted by the back of his arms – _losing so much blood_ – and he tried to tense and shift his weight to relieve as much pressure as possible from the gunshot wound.

At least she seemed to have been right about his ankle. The pulsing pain was already subsiding, even as it dragged across the concrete as rough hands pulled him across the floor.

He heard the van door opening, and suddenly his mind was back to five years ago; to his first encounter with SHIELD.

He’d been at the courthouse, ready to face his first charges as an adult. Then he’d had one conversation with a man he’d later come to call Agent Coulson. He’d heard one question, and he’d given one answer.

“ _Yes._ ”

And then, next thing he knew, he was being loaded into a van, bag over his head, and ignorant of any coming events. Afraid. Alone.

The similarities were too much, and when the prick in his neck came, he welcomed the ensuing darkness. He hoped Natalia was doing the same. Drugs were so much worse when you fought them.

At least they hadn’t been shot on sight.

***

Clint woke with a groggy sense of despair. It wasn’t an entirely new feeling, but it still wasn’t pleasant. He knew that there was something really important that he was supposed to be doing, which usually meant that he’d been taken in the middle of a con.

No…

Mission. In the middle of a mission. And this missions was…

He drew in a sharp breath and opened his eyes, for himself to sit still and think through the moment. If he wasn’t dead then SHIELD wasn’t calling this a total loss. If they considered the Black Widow worth the risk of keeping alive, then there was actually the possibility that SHIELD considered this a win.

Although, the fact that he was handcuffed to a chair didn’t really help the hope rise any higher.

He took a slow breath and used the energy to pull his head up and look around. He was in one of the interrogation rooms, surprise surprise, and it didn’t appear to be otherwise occupied. Well, if they were going to play the waiting game, it would have to be a long one. He’d been on the other side of it often enough. It wasn’t going to intimidate him.

Oh. Except he’d been wounded, hadn’t he? Pretty badly, because…yeah the pain in his ribs was still there. However, a quick self-examination revealed that his ankle was in an ACE wrap, and his shoulder had been cleaned and bandaged.

And he was in a pair of sweats. That was a big plus.

So, maybe SHIELD really wasn’t counting this against him. Maybe this was just a formality. He had to admit, from an outside point of view, the whole thing had a suspicious air. A mess of an Agent takes on one of the world’s most deadly assassins and is found soon after sitting next to her and chatting about just-assassin-things.

Yeah, ok. He’d have himself in handcuffs, too.

The door handle turned, and Clint refocused on the door as it swung open. He hadn’t really been expecting anybody in particular – they wouldn’t let Coulson down here with how heavily invested he was – but it was still a surprise to see Director Fury himself.

“Shit,” Clint breathed. “Guess I done fucked up.”

“Oh?” Fury asked, one eyebrow raised. “How so?”

“I mean…” Clint gestured at the other man the best he could with handcuffs on. “You don’t usually go places in person, from what I’ve heard. Makes me wonder what I did.”

“That’s what I’m here to ask you. What did you do? I want to hear it from you.”

Clint’s attention was drawn back to the door again, where some techs were wheeling in a device that Clint was already familiar with, even during his short time at in the organization. It was SHIELD’s lie detector, and it beat the hell out of those civilian ones.

Normally, that thing’s arrival would be a relief, since Clint rarely had anything to actually hide. Today, however, he was unsure what it would reveal.

“Look, sir,” Clint answered, licking his lips slowly and still watching the machine. “I did what I thought was right. I did what I had to.” That was usually a pretty safe answer.

“Bullshit,” Fury snapped.

Ok, so maybe not.

“What I want here,” Fury continued, “And what I’m definitely going to get, is your explanation of events. And then I get to decide what happens next.”

“Fantastic,” Clint murmured, wincing as the device was fitted over his head, staring into his eyes.

“Look straight ahead,” one of the techs ordered. He sounded bored.

The room waited in silence until all the tricks were set up, and the machine whirred up to a gentle hum. By the time the tech finally stepped back and nodded at Fury, Clint had worked up a cold sweat. How many times did he have to escape death in one week?

“I’m going to start with the most important question, Barton. Why didn’t you shoot the target?”

Clint laughed loudly once. The sound was harsh and sudden, and at least one of the tech’s startled. Fury just kept staring.

“Why didn’t I shoot her? You think I could have shot her? That was never on the table. You don’t understand how much dumb luck it took to get an arrow through her _leg_. I was never going to put one through her eye.”

“You had her cornered in a confined space. You convinced her to throw her weapon on the ground. I want to know why you didn’t kill her then.”

“I’d already thrown down my own weapons by that point,” Clint explained, exasperated. “I was literally naked before she became even a little bit vulnerable. And before you ask why I didn’t take the moment to kill her right before that team came in, you should know, that would have ended really poorly for everyone.”

“That doesn’t explain why, after all that e–”

“Hang on,” Clint interrupted. He’d just realized something, and it twisted his entire view of the situation. “You’re asking me a lot of questions about why I didn’t kill her. So why didn’t _you_ kill her?”

“Barton, I don’t –”

“No! You’ve got me trussed up down here like a threat, and you’re asking the wrong questions. You should be asking why _she_ didn’t kill _me_. That’s the hole in this puzzle here. You should be asking about back-alley meetings and possible liaisons in foreign countries. But you want to know why I didn’t kill a wounded girl who willingly disarmed herself?”

“Yes,” Fury stated simply. “Although I’d also like to know how you convinced her to disarm herself. Your radio was off.”

It was an unsubtle reminder of how thin his ice was, and Clint ignored it completely.

“You’re honestly asking why I didn’t comply with your orders?” Clint screamed. He arched his body hard enough that the tech had to reach out and steady the equipment. “You sent me to die!”

“Did I?” Fury asked.

The brief anger bottomed out, and Clint licked his lips again. He thought through the painfully simple question a few times. He pulled, absentmindedly, at the handcuffs. He wished that damn machine didn’t make that low-pitched whining noise all the time.

“Didn’t you?” he finally responded.

“I have a tendency to get what I want, Barton. And that’s true because I don’t waste time on games. You know this. So why did you suddenly assume I’d take such a roundabout action of recourse?”

“I’m not following…”

There was a rustling noise, and Clint peered around the device staring into his eyes. Fury was waving the techs out of the room, and they shuffled away obediently. Once they’d left, and closed the door behind them, Fury stepped forward and pulled the headpiece off and set it on the console.

Clint shook his head a few times, trying to get rid of the heavy sensation. Sweat had beaded along his hairline, and he could feel the damp stickiness. The room was too warm, even in nothing but sweatpants.

“If I’d considered you enough of a liability to warrant execution, I would have simply had you shot. If I thought you were a danger to my other agents, I wouldn’t have even hesitated.”

“Seems like a lot of paperwork.”

“Calling in favors doesn’t need paperwork.”

The straightforward statement was too much for Clint, and he looked up at the ceiling to avoid the Director’s steady gaze. That didn’t stop him from continuing, though.

“If you looked at that mission and thought ‘suicide’ then that’s your own fault. You misjudged you own talents. If everyone else looked at that mission and thought ‘suicide’ then they have the same problem.”

“You’re saying you planned this?” Clint snapped. He was trying to get angry, but it was nothing more than a spark against damp wood.

Fury snorted. “I’ve already learned not to plan when it comes to you. But I wanted something very particular, and I was told I couldn’t have it. Thus,” he gestured at Clint, then grinned. “I improvised.”

The sheer obvious nature of the entire situation crashed into Clint.

“You wanted the Widow,” he gaped. “Then why not just fucking _ask_ me to go and get her. God!” He thrashed once in restraints, sliding the chair across the floor with a harsh off-key noise.

“Did I want the Widow?” Fury asked, carefully innocent consideration all over his face. “I can’t say that that was the _mission_. But now that I have her,” he shrugged. “Seems a waste not to put her to use.”

Something in Clint ran cold. If SHIELD was going to experiment on someone _he’d_ brought back then –

“And, of course, there’s still the matter of you refusing to complete the mission. There has to be some sort of punitive action for that.”

“Meaning?” Clint asked. He clenched his back teeth and watched Fury out of the corner of his eye.

“Punishment fitting the crime and all that. Or, two birds with one stone, if you will. I think I’ll be assigning you as her guard. I want to see her unconfined, but I obviously can’t give her free reign. You make a perfect solution.”

“She could kill me without having to even plan it.”

“Oh, don’t worry. We’ve got a few ideas about that one. How about you let me worry about keeping her from killing everyone and escaping into the night. You worry about what you’re going to say to her when you see her this afternoon.”

Clint opened his mouth a few times, but nothing seemed forthcoming.

***

A few hours later, Clint was seated in Coulson’s office, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs had left their red stripes. He was chewing the inside of his cheek, waiting for guards to bring Natalia through the door.

In his hands, he held a thin manilla folder.

**Mission Objective: Acclimatization**

It wasn’t a directive he’d seen before, and he wasn’t even sure what it really meant. The rest of the file had been woefully sparse, and completely unhelpful. There had been some blank paperwork for Natalia to fill out, some emergency phone numbers, a risk assessment form, off-limits areas, and a temporary paper pass. No helpful instructions. No daily task list. Clint supposed he’d just have to wing it. Again.

“So,” Clint began, looking up at Coulson. “Director Fury certainly seems to have a talent to getting what he wants.”

“If you’ve truly learned that,” Coulson answered. “Then this has been a valuable day, indeed.”

***

When she’d told him her name, it had been an act of defiance. She didn’t want the Black Widow there, at the end. She wanted herself back, even if it was only in her last few seconds. It had been painfully important – her only memory from before.

Fire, smoke, being dragged from a woman’s arms.

“ _Remember me!_ ”

And she’d tried – she really had – but that life had been cut out of her a long time ago. The name was the least she could do. A last attempt to keep the request of the crying burning woman. She would not die their weapon.

And then, he’d turned it right back around on her.

_Clint Barton  
_

And then, she hadn’t died.

She curled her body a little tighter, wedged in underneath the bed. It had been a surprise to see the cell’s simple furniture. Needles to the neck usually meant waking up in dark bare cells. This was painfully humane, and she pressed herself against the cold floor to try and stop her shivers. She didn’t deserve to slip between the sheets today. She hadn’t done anything to earn it.

Everything was falling apart. She was spread too thin, across too many memories and too many people. Everywhere she went, people took another bit of her. Cut out a little more of her.

“We don’t need this part of you,” they snarled. “Get rid of it.”

She wondered what was left. It didn’t feel like much.

She wondered what time it was, and how many seconds she had left before alarms started going off. Maybe she’d slept for days, and it was already over. Maybe they hadn’t needed it her. Maybe they’d gotten in and out. Maybe they’d been caught before they went three steps.

She hoped it wasn’t the last. If they gave her name during their interrogations, things would just be that much harder for her here.

She wondered what an archer’s hands felt like. She wasn’t familiar with the way a bow wore and rebuilt your fingers. She could have found out, in the warehouse. Run her fingers over his own. He would have let her. Hell, he would have let her do anything in that moment. She could have choked him out and he would have just watched her with those goddamn piercing eyes.

She’d heard, a long time ago on an assignment – almost forgotten – that “the sub is really the one with the power.” She hadn’t understood at the time. In fact, she’d thought it had been an incredibly naïve and stupid statement. All the way up to that moment in the warehouse. Because yeah, in that moment, Clint Barton would have let her do anything to him. And at the same time, she couldn’t have done a single thing he didn’t want.

When an enemy offers you their life, what does it make them? What does it make you, when you don’t take it?

She slammed her palms against the bottom of the bed above her. If she didn’t get some sleep, she wouldn’t be ready for whatever they had in store for the morning.

_You won’t be ready, even if you do._

She threw the voice out of her head and tried to concentrate on her breathing. There was a dull throbbing under the skin of her neck, and she ran her fingers over it quickly. The rough puckering of scarred skin told her they’d put something in her neck, but it didn’t bother her more than anything else about the situation.

Sill counting her breaths, she soothed herself by running her fingers up and down the new scar, letting the indents become familiar as they wore at her fingers. The exercise was interrupted, however, when the window in her cell door opened. She peered out from under the bed, meeting the eyes of whoever was looking in at her.

“Natalia,” the voice said, and she clenched her teeth against the audacity. Her body and mind wound up like a tight spring. Heaven could help whoever came through that door first, but it wouldn’t do anything for them.

But then the voice continued speaking, and what it had to say was a far cry from what she’d been expecting to hear.

“Excuse me,” she interrupted politely. “Could you repeat that last bit?”

Hesitation from the voice, as he tried to figure out which part she meant, and then, “You’ll be placed under the supervision of Agent Barton until such time as SHIELD collectively decides to increase your privilege of freedom.”

The crying boy. They were going to give her to the crying boy? To do _what_ , exactly?

“I accept,” she interrupted again.

There was a pause and, for moment, she thought the voice was going to be stupid enough to insist on reading the entire thing. However, after a moment of deliberation, it announced, “Then let’s get you out of here.”

***

Clint thought he’d prepared himself for the upcoming moment. However, seeing her actually walk through the door twisted something inside him, and he rushed to turn back and look at Coulson again.

 _Deep breath_ , Coulson mouthed at him. Clint complied carefully, listening as the woman walked around to sit in the other chair. Her footsteps were even, and Clint shifted in his seat when he thought of the arrow going through her flesh. Her footsteps shouldn’t be that even.

“If I may have your attention,” her escort announced, and Clint twisted around to the left, to avoid looking at her.

“I’m sure you’ve both been given a summary statement. And Barton, I know you have your mission file. But I’m here to make sure you both understand the limitations of the device we’ve implanted in the Black Widow’s neck. For lack of a better term, it’s a kill switch. It can be activated verbally, or by more than a half-mile of distance between the two of you, or by attempting to dig it out. It will also be activated automatically by Barton’s death. Barton, the verbal activation phrase is in your file.”

Clint nodded, even though he had no intention of using it. If Natalia wanted to do something worthy of an execution, then she was going to have to step over Clint’s body to do it, and it wouldn’t matter then anyway.

“Any questions? Anything unclear about the nature of the device?”

“How will it do it?” Clint asked, since it didn’t seem like Natalia was going to ask.

The man looked Clint in the eye and spoke deliberately. “It will burn her. Burn through her skin and nerves and vessels. It will be slow.”

Clint sputtered for a moment before he spat out, “What the _fuck_!”

“It’s an incentive,” Natalia spoke quietly, and Clint was finally forced to turn around and look at her. She was seated in the chair, cross-legged and calm. She was wearing the same thing as Clint, gray sweatpants with a white tank top and white plimsole shoes.

She blinked slowly, once, keeping her expression blank and unmoving.

“Incentive to _what_?”

“To not trigger it,” she answered. “They don’t want a suicide bomber walking around the facility. If it would give me a quick death, then I might be tempted to utilize the out and take as many people down with me as possible. However, if the death is slow, then I’m less likely to see that as an acceptable solution.”

Clint looked at Coulson, trying to find some support for his point of view, but the man was staring at the floor.

“The exception,” the man continued, bringing Clint’s attention back to him, “is your verbal phrase. As it’s for emergency use, that will kill her instantly, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Clint echoed with a bitter twist to his lips.

“Any other questions?”

“I guess not.”

The man bowed his head briefly, and then stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him. Clint swung back around to look at Coulson.

“That’s it?” he snapped. “Just like that? What am I supposed to do with…” He trailed off and looked over at Natalia.

“Whatever you please,” she answered him calmly. “It does not appear that I’m in a position to object.”

Coulson cleared his throat, and Clint kept his eyes on Natalia as she turned to look at his – their? – current handler. Eventually, he turned as well.

“I wouldn’t presume,” Coulson began, “to dictate how you handle this. Natalia,” he nodded at the assassin, “your motivations are your own, and I’m sure you intend to keep them that way. However, neither of you can deny that someone said something in that warehouse that changed you both. I don’t know what it was, and I’m not going to ask. However, I recommend that you two figure it out. And good luck.”

“That’s it?” Clint repeated, but Natalia had already stood behind him, so he got to his feet as well. He made final eye contact with Coulson who said, “Call me if you need something.”

Clint needed a lot of things, but none of them were the kind that Coulson meant in that moment. So Clint turned and led Natalia out of the room. He closed the door behind him, took a deep breath, and met her eyes.

They hovered there, with silence between them, for a little longer than a heartbeat. And then…

“Chase me,” she announced, and Clint barely had time to blink before she was off down the hall.

He took off after her on some instinct, file folder still clutched in his hand. A half mile was a long distance until it suddenly wasn’t. She wouldn’t need more than a few minutes to cross that line, and this game would be over before it started.

“What the hell?” he shouted after her, but she just kept moving. She took a corner particularly quickly and had to throw out her hand to keep from colliding with the wall. Instead she used the momentum like a spring and disappeared from his sight for a moment.

When he came around the corner as well, he was dismayed to realize he was losing ground. He threw the file to the floor - hearing the papers scatter and slide - and put his entire body into the chase.

“I put an arrow through your leg!” he cried out, putting on more speed. Surely she couldn’t keep this up.

She didn’t answer him, taking another corner, this time by half running up the wall and jumping. Clint learned why a few moments later, when he took the same corner and collided with a cart covered with electronics. The man pushing it was looking back over his shoulder at Natalia, but his attention came back to Clint quickly enough when the cart tipped over from the impact.

“Hey,” he shouted.

“Sorry,” Clint muttered, barely loud enough to be heard. His ankle was starting to throb, and his shoulder was piercing pain through his chest with every deep breath.

She had a hole in her leg. And she’d nearly been burned alive in an explosion. The entire thing was unfair and, on some level, ridiculous. A week ago he’d been celebrating getting assigned to his first solo mission. Now? Who knew what the hell he was doing now.

He finally got his stride back and burst through the stairwell Natalia had just disappeared into. Her footsteps were taking her further up, and he sighed heavily. Of course she wasn’t going down. He might have been able to catch her then. He was pretty good a falling.

“They said it’d be slow,” he reminded her before he began to rush up the stairs.

“Only if you don’t keep up,” she shot back from a few floors above him.

She took them up several flights in silence after that. Clint was starting to feel worried. They were nearing the top of the underground structure. In a few minutes, pulling ahead of him wouldn’t be her main threat. She’d have to deal with SHIELD security, and Clint knew she didn’t have any clearance to leave.

He refocused his energy, trying for the last bits of adrenaline, just as she came up to ground level and shoved open the heavy metal door.

“Shit,” Clint shouted. The door was already all the way closed before he hit it. In fact, he came through late enough that he almost missed which way she turned at the end of the hall.

_I’m not going to make it._

The thought sent an ethereal daze through him, and he suddenly couldn’t feel his body anymore. Unfortunately, it didn’t let him increase his speed, although his ankle wasn’t bothering him anymore.

_If she goes through that gate at a run, and gets herself shot to hell, then I am following her through it._

He wasn’t sure if that was his willingness to die, leftover from the mission, or if it was something else. Either way, the eerie calm pervaded his body.

Which meant that, as he watched her approach the final corner, he almost fell on his face when she went the wrong way. Was that on purpose? Was she simply unfamiliar with the base layout?

Thinking back, actually, the fact that she’d known how to get here in the first place was unnerving in and of itself. It wasn’t exactly a complicated layout, except she’d headed straight for the stairs. Places like this didn’t have red “exit” signs.

He felt like he was going to throw up. Running this hard after with nothing but drug leftovers in his bloodstream. His stomach turned as he took yet another branch of yet another hallway.

And almost ran straight into her.

She’d come to a stop at a closed door and was calmly tinkering with the lock mechanism she’d pried off the wall next to it.

“Stop that,” he snapped, knocking it out of her hands. It swung back and forth by its wires, scrapping the unpainted wall.

She looked at him – barely breathing hard while Clint panted – considered him carefully, and then picked the device back up.

“Are you going to execute me?” she asked him. No intonation.

“I think you and I both know that’s not going to happen. What the hell are you doing?” He knocked the device out of her hands again, waited a few seconds, and then watched her pick it back up.

“Exactly what I was told to. I want you to see.”

“See what?” Clint gave up, leaning his good shoulder against the wall and taking his weight off one ankle. “And I’m extremely jealous at quickly you’ve healed, by the way. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

She shrugged. Fucking serumic enhancements. He wished he could get his hands on something like that. Although, considering the price it looked like Natalia had paid for it, maybe not so much. Actually, even Captain America hadn’t had a fun joyride with those. Maybe he should just stick to his humanity.

The door opened with a click, and Natalia reattached the mechanism to the wall. She even twisted the screws back in with her fingernails. Clint glanced up at the security cameras watching them and rolled his eyes.

“They’re not on,” Natalia informed him.

It took Clint a moment to realize she’d seen him looking at the camera. She’d turned, standing with her back against the door and her head cocked oddly to the side. He realized, with a start, that she was looking at his watch.

“They’re not on?” he repeated, watching her face. A deep cold pit was forming in his stomach as he looked back up at the camera again. It wasn’t like they had little red lights to tell him if they were working or not.

“Natalia,” he breathe, some kind of panic working his way into this throat and heart and lungs. If this had been a goddamn trick, then he was done. If this was a lie from start to finish, then he’d find a bullet to put through his head, one way or another. It might be after he’d choked the life out of her, but he’d do it.

The rest of the moment was in slow motion.

He turned back to her, face twisted in poisoned rage and ready to rend her flesh.  
  
---  
  
She leaned back against the door, slowly letting it swing open with her weight.  
  
One the other side was a man, gun in hand, whose eyes widened when he saw Clint.  
  
Natalia took him by the chin and shoulder, snapping his neck.  
  
 Clint reached her then, finally, just as she drew the dead man’s gun from his hand. He wrapped one arm around her neck, drawing her body back against his, and grabbed her wrist with the other.

“Drop it,” he hissed, the trigger phrase just behind his teeth. He shook her hand hard, feeling her fingers tighten around the weapon, rather than releasing it.

“You really don’t want me to,” she said. Placating, but sincere. The door was still swinging open, revealing the rest of the room. He had a moment of odd peace to look around, and saw that the room was being used for some sort of cooling. There was a large square pit in the middle, deep and filled with clear water. Various tanks, screens, and tubes were set up around it, but there didn’t appear to be anything actually submerged.

There were also at least six other men, and – Clint realized with alarm – none of them were wearing SHIELD uniforms.

Neither had the man whom Natalia had just killed. He loosened his grip on her just enough that she could feel it, and she took the opportunity to shove him backwards. He stumbled a few steps and hit the wall, shielded from whatever might come flying out the door.

Nothing came flying out the door.

Natalia leveled six shots, arm calmly outstretch, in three seconds flat. Clint shuffled forward to look around the door, fingers itching for his bow, or even a knife.

“You going to tell me what’s going on?” The six men were sprawled across the floor, supposedly dead, at various stages of drawing their weapons.

“They thought I was on their side,” she smiled. “They should know better than to assume that means they don’t need to have drawn weapons.”

“Natalia,” Clint growled.

“You weren’t the only reason I was in Italy,” she said, walking into the room. “I had a contact there, ready to get a strike force into SHIELD. They had the cameras and entry points already taken care of, but they needed an escort. Some extra security to get them through the base and out again.”

Clint was eyeing the gun, held loosely in her hand and pointed at the floor. When she noticed him watching it, she tossed it casually to the ground, where it clattered.

“I was supposed to meet them here. Actually,” she smiled ruefully. “I’m a few minutes late. Ironic, somehow.”

“You just changed your mind,” Clint snapped. “Just like that? One minute you’re supposed to be using me to help get them in, and the next you’re just not on their side anymore? Bullshit!”

Natalia looked at him with the first real expression he’d seen on her face since the warehouse. Surprise. Possibly even confusion.

“You were never part of the plan,” she said slowly, maintaining eye contact. “After I’d killed you, I had a plane waiting for me. I had my own way in here, through a shipping delivery. I was to wait until 1557, local time, and then make my way straight here. Help them to the target, get them back, and then use their exit route with them.”

Clint’s head was spinning as he glanced behind him again. The hallway was still empty. The gun she’d used had had a silencer, but surely someone must have heard something?

“How long are the cameras down for?”

He turned back to find she’d walked away a bit, down by the water’s edge. He wondered what the room was for. It didn’t appear to be on, and the lights were dim. It augmented the odd reflection of the water against the ceiling and walls.

“Another thirty minutes, at least.” She crouched down and dipped her fingers in the water. She swirled her hand around, and then pulled it out, rubbing the running droplets between her fingers.

“Do you know what they were after?” Clint pushed.

Natalia, maddeningly, just shrugged. “I don’t know how they got in, either. Don’t know how we were getting out. Don’t know who they were. Sorry. I don’t usually ask a lot of questions. They don’t usually matter.”

She stood then and toed off the soft white shoes. Like Clint, she had no socks on underneath, and she shifted her weight carefully as she stood on the grating. Then she stepped out confidently and fell, plunging into the deep water, submerging herself completely.

Clint took a few automatic steps, and stopped beside the edge of the water. Then she surfaced suddenly, throwing her head back so her dripping hair threw water droplets in every direction.

“Are you coming?” she asked, treading water.

“What even is this place? You don’t know what that stuff’s going to do to you.”

“It isn’t guarded,” she pointed out. “That’s why this was the meeting room in the first place. No one’s ever here. And the water is warm. Perfectly body temperature.”

Now that he thought about it, Clint could feel the unnatural heat in the room. He glanced back over his shoulder, through the open door. There was a body lying right there in the doorway. People would be here at any second. Angry people, whom Clint would have to explain himself to, yet again. People who would want to know why, after defending SHIELD from an infiltration – if they even believed that part – he had decided to take a fucking swim, rather than report it.

“Come be baptized with me,” she said. A prayer. An order. A plea.

He toed off his shoes, and kicked them over to join Natalia’s. Then he jumped.

She’d been right. The water was warm. It matched his own body temperature, enveloping him as he sank. He didn’t move for the longest time, just letting himself sink lower and lower. Falling until his lungs burned with a deeper heat than the water itself. Then he kicked out, and shot back up to the surface.

Natalia was hanging from the wall, facing out toward the rest of the water. Clint swam over to join her, hooking his elbows up on the wall so he could float in easy suspension.

“I’m in,” Natalia told him, and he turned to look at her. Something there, in the intensity of her eyes, caught his breath.

She continued, “I’m all in; with this, with SHIELD, with whatever comes next. I’m giving it one last chance. I’m not taking anything with me. There’s nothing I’m leaving behind that I’ll miss.”

“What did they do to you?” Clint wondered aloud.

She shook her head once, either in denial against Clint or herself, and finished, “I’m giving it one last chance. One last try. I’m going to try it your way. What you say is right will be my right. What you say is sacred will be my sacred. Where you go, I will follow, and what you say, I will echo.”

“No,” Clint choked. “Not me. Of all the fucked up people in the world to make this oath to, you picked _me_? It’s not fair. Pick Coulson, or Ward, or a thousand other people here who are a thousand times better than me.”

“I’m giving it one more chance,” she repeated, no compromise in her eyes.

“Giving what one more chance?” Clint finally got the courage to ask.

“Life. One more chance. Maybe there is happiness here. There certainly isn’t any anywhere else.”

Seventeen minutes, turned out to be the answer to Clint’s persistent question. It took seventeen minutes for anyone to notice something was wrong. When the alarms went off, the two assassins continued to float silently in the pool.

When they climbed out, they would be new people. For a moment, however, it was nice to just be no one at all.


	4. Idols

Clint was right about one thing. He was doing a lot of explaining. However, he had a deep suspicion that the sheer number of questions he was answering was nothing compared to what Natalia was going through.

When they’d dragged her off, Clint had spat out his share of snarling “don’t hurt her”s, but there was only so much effect that had, coming from a fellow prisoner. In fact, he half expected Fury to come back into the interrogation room he’d been thrown into – same old, same old – and sneer something about, “that’s not what I meant when I said to guard her, Barton.”

It hadn’t been Fury, who was obviously busy with more important things than a boots-on-the-ground infiltration of _his_ facility. Rather, Clint had argued with some route interrogators for a few hours. Then he argued with their superiors. Then they left him alone.

He perched himself on the table, feet resting on the back of the chair in front of him. He stared at the one-way glass, watching his own reflection. It shifted when he shifted and grimaced when he grimaced. As though it was him. As though it had that right.

At least he wasn’t handcuffed.

He spun around from where he was sitting on the table so he could stare at the blank wall instead. Much less likely that he’d do something stupid, like throw something at the glass. That would probably start the rounds of questions all over again.

God, he didn’t know what to do with this anger anymore. It had always buzzed somewhere, underneath his layers of stillness. You couldn’t be a sniper if you couldn’t control your muscles, so he’d learned some stop-gap measures, but when he didn’t have his eye on a target he returned to this. He tried to force cooperation by holding his breath, but it was just a mockery of stillness.

If he was being honest, though, the stop-gap measures had been failing for a long time. They had never been going to last forever. That was evident in the way the last few months had been falling apart. Of course his resolve would give up and fail him just when his life was getting itself on track.

Maybe it was time to try something new.

He thought back to the moments in the water. When Natalia had vowed herself into a new person, he’d felt a longing echo somewhere in the back of his mind. Sitting now, staring at the wall, he felt overcome by an odd jealousy. She got to be someone new. Why couldn’t he?

And how fucked up did he have to be, to be jealous of a nearly-empty shell? Besides, it was such wasted energy. He’d been there, too, after all. He’d submerged himself and come out dripping. He’d heard the words, whispered in the darkened room. It had been his baptism as well.

Maybe it was time for a change. Natalia had summarized it nicely. _There’s nothing I’m leaving behind that I’ll miss._

When the door was opened, hours later, Clint was sitting in the chair. He’d turned it around to face his own reflection. The two images of the man were staring at each other, without commentary.

“Barton,” an Agent said from the hallway. “You and the Black Widow are free to go.”

Clint broke his eye contact with himself to glance over at the man.

_Black Widow?_

That definitely wasn’t going to stick. She’d been made new. “Black Widow” might work well enough for a codename, but she was going to need something else for daily life. “Natalia” wouldn’t do either. Not if they were serious about this abrupt turnover within their lives.

“Coming,” he answered out loud, calmly.

He stood up from the chair and left the cell, not even glancing backward at the retreating reflection.

***

“Hey,” Clint greeted her softly. In a mockery of a many hours ago, they’d been re-released into each other’s care. At the sound of his voice, she looked up from where she’d been studying the floor, and gave him a gentle smile.

“Rough day,” he continued. “Well, rough day and rough night. You ok?” There were bags under her eyes, and she seemed drawn. Not as drawn as he’d expected, though. Which was slightly suspicious. For a couple of people who weren’t worth much to SHIELD, they hadn’t faced a lot of suspicion for their proximity to a nearly-successful infiltration.

It might have had something to do with the dead bodies and Natalia’s willing cooperation, but Clint suspected it had more to do with a hands-on interference from Fury himself. Natalia was apparently his newest pet project, and special attention from the Director got a lot of things overlooked. Clint probably had a longer leash in this moment than he had back when he’d actually been trying to toe the line.

“I need to eat something,” Natalia stated, interrupting his thoughts. “If you want me to continue to perform at an acceptable level.”

“Shit, yeah sure. Sorry. Chows hall’s closed right now, but there’s a 24 hour place with some stuff. I’m at the base hotel, so no food there.” He laughed weakly, running his fingers back and forth over his hair.

“You don’t have food in your hotel?”

He shrugged. “Not anything you’d probably eat. Leftover pizza. Beer. Might have some beef jerky lying around. I think I’ve got an MRE stashed somewhere, if you’re _really_ desperate.” He laughed weakly, hoping she’d get the joke, but she just shrugged.

“That’s fine. I’m not picky.”

If she was serious about that echoing him thing, then he was going to have to improve his diet, at the very least.

“Ok then,” he sighed. “Let’s head out?” He dug through the returned manila folder and pulled out the paper pass. He handed it over and she took it with careful fingers. “We’ll get you to the TAC office ASAP tomorrow. I’ve got your orders here, and I’m hoping that they have you on file enough to get you an official one. We should get you a meal card, too. Guess there’s a lot of administrative stuff to take care of.”

***

When they got to the hotel room, he shuffled in ahead of her, dropping his bag and file – which opened and scattered papers across the floor – just inside the doorway. He fumbled for the lights with one hand, turning back to look at her in the hallway. She kept her place, waiting to be invited in.

“Um,” he muttered, looking back over his left shoulder back into the hotel room. “It’s not much. Not at all, really. Clean place to crash, I guess. So, for what it’s worth, what’s mine is yours. Sorry that’s such a shitty offer.”

As he beckoned her forward, she complied with a few steps, stopping just inside the door. Barton let the door go, and it shut with a harsh double clang as he hurried into the rest of the room. There was a mirror on the wall to her left, giving the cramped hole the illusion of space, and she gave herself a once over as Barton rustled around in her peripheral vision; throwing away trash, making the bed, sliding the chair back under the desk.

Her reflection was not glorious to behold. The mass produced prison-like wardrobe was not designed to be flattering, and her hair was a greasy flattened mess. Her makeup had come off in the pool of water, though her skin appeared mostly passable. If she got him to turn down the lights, she’d be fine.

She toed the white plimsoles off and lined them side-by-side next to Clint’s things. Then she tucked the papers back in the file, lingering to glance at several of them. It didn’t turn out to be anything interesting, just basic info about herself and some directives regarding her care. She didn’t see the kill-phrase for her implant. He must have tucked that away somewhere else. Maybe even destroyed it already.

She flipped the folder over to face up and stood lithely when Barton came back around the corner. He was holding a brown thick-plastic package, and he tossed it to her underhand. After catching it, she saw the “MRE” printed and felt a brief relief that she’d be allowed to eat first. It had been over 24 hours, and she’d warned him that she wouldn’t be functioning properly until she ate. Still, men with kill-switches in their hands and behind their teeth tended to push their power around. See how far it would take them.

She walked into the room and sat criss-cross on the soft carpet, leaning back against the foot of the bed. She opened and organized the various contents while Barton stood still in front of her. Glancing up, she saw he was looking back and forth across the length of the tiny room, as though he expected to find something there he hadn’t noticed before.

“So, uh…” he began, and then trailed off.

She waited calmly for the other shoe to drop, spooning and chewing the stew-like nutrition mechanically.

“I didn’t think about the bed,” he said in a rush. “There’s only one.”

He was running his fingers through his short hair, tugging at it with closed fists, without seeming to notice he was doing it.

As for herself, she was holding off responding until she considered the whole statement, including all of its implications. Every possible track.

It wasn’t getting her far. Her mind kept shorting out. God, she’d let herself get too tired. Reckless.

_run ragged_

She’d taken too long to respond, and he plunged ahead again. “It’s fine. I’ll take the floor. No problem. Only fair.”

She wasn’t sure how it was “only fair,” when _he_ was the one with the kill-switch, but he was already pulling the comforter and blanket off the bed, leaving the double set of sheets on. He dropped the bundle in his arms, without ceremony, on the floor space next to Natalia. She stared at them, piled next to her side. She couldn’t keep up with how quickly he changed directions. How quickly he made decisions. She was still trying to find her first response when he was off yet again.

“How do you like your name?”

How did she like – _what name?_ What the hell? How was she supposed to figure out this path? She had set out to trace his footsteps, to place her feet exactly where his had been, trying to redirect her life to trace the path his own had taken.

Except he wasn’t leaving any damn footprints!

“I don’t understand what you mean,”                                                                   _help me_

                                                                    she admitted quietly.

“Your new name,” Barton pressed. “Natasha. They put it on the paperwork you flipped through just now. I thought you saw.”

She’d seen but she hadn’t _noticed._ Hadn’t even glanced at the name, more preoccupied by other possibilities.

“It’s fine,” she answered quickly. It was just as good a name as any. Close enough to have a familiar ring, but different enough that unskilled databases wouldn’t see the connection.

 _Natasha_.

But when the lights had been turned off, with Natalia in the bed and Clint on the floor – exactly as promised – she tried the new nomenclature out on her tongue. Even though it hadn’t been given to her _by_ Clint, strictly speaking, she’d still heard it from him first.

 _Natasha_.

Somehow, it seemed like the first imprint, left behind in the sand, and she stepped out boldly into it. She was only mildly surprised at how well the shape fit her own foot.

 _Natasha_.

As though it was her own.

 _Natasha_.

***

The worst part was that neither of them was used to the other. It wasn’t a matter of disrespect or misunderstanding – they were both too well trained – but simply unfamiliarity. One shifted position and the other didn’t. Crossed legs bumped each other and shied away. Awkward eye contact happened so often that they both took up just looking at the floor.

The silence had turned oppressive again. After an entire day arguing with various TAC officers, Clint was wound tight and just waiting for something to spring him. Everything that could have held them up was holding them up. Natasha wasn’t on the list, she wasn’t an official asset yet, no one had signed this particular page, the date was written wrong on this one.

All of it culminated in Clint and Natasha sitting side by side, with nothing but a mutual frustration between them. It was almost close of business, and they were still working on the asset pass. It was the last administrative action they had to take care of, and Clint was bouncing his leg, letting his heel hit the floor – _tap tap tap tap tap_ – as the seconds ticked away. Natasha, in contrast, was a marble statue.

_Tap tap tap tap tap._

Desperate attempt to break the silence. The entire waiting room was otherwise empty, and Clint was listening intently to the thin noise. It wasn’t enough, though, and he broke the tense lack of communication without preamble.

“So what do you think of your first day?”

“Of paperwork?” She shot back, without the slightest pause to acclimatize herself to being so suddenly drawn into a conversation.

“Sure, whatever. How’s the paperwork?”

“It’s my favorite. I’d a hundred times rather be here than out in the cold and dark, waiting for a target.”

Clint considered the answer, letting it hang there before he asked, tentatively, “Are you being sarcastic?”

“God, no. This is what I was trained for, after all. I’m never truly happy unless I’m standing at a counter, holding a pen with a chain connecting it to the desk. In fact, sometimes I sign in the wrong place on purpose, just so I can get the form back and do it all over again.”

Clint laughed. Not for very long, but out loud and genuine. At the sound, Natasha lips quirked and she cast her eyes down to look at the floor.

“There you are!” he crowed, grinning at her. “I was scared. Thought you had all the personality beaten out of you or something. I’ve seen ‘recovered’ assets before, and they don’t always have something left of their soul. I mean, the warehouse was…” He trailed off there, unsure if it was possible to verbalize _what_ the warehouse had been. “Well, let’s just say that I’m glad to see I didn’t guess wrong in that warehouse.” He leaned forward and stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Natasha.”

She shook it solemnly. “The pleasure is all mine, Barton.”

When Natasha’s name was called a few minutes later, Clint called out, “Thank god! We were starting to get scared that we were done filling out forms today.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed under her breath, for only Clint to hear. “What would we have done with our day? Go eat? Shower? Actually get to sleep at a decent hour? Thank the gods there are more administrative duties to keep us here.”

Clint was laughing again, as Natasha made her way up to the desk.

***

That night was mostly a repeat of the one before. Their day had been too full to prioritize getting any kind of groceries, and Natasha suspected that Barton would have forgotten anyway. They ordered a pizza – the delivery guy greeted Barton on a first name basis – and Barton murmured something about how he’d forgotten to look into getting another room. He stared at her after that, letting the silence sit, but she let it be, running out the clock until he’d self-correct back into his rambling verbal monologue.

The tactic proved effective enough, because he eventually shrugged and added, “I guess we don’t know how long we’re going to be here. Coulson wants to see us tomorrow at 0900. Who knows where they’ll be sending us?” He chewed on his bottom lip a moment, then added, “Yeah, they could send us anywhere really. No clue how that’s going to work out.”

“Sorry,” she said, since that one really was on her. She’d thrown a wrench in his path, whatever it had been.

“Not your fault,” he corrected with a laugh. “I was kind of in the doghouse before this detail even started. You didn’t throw off my groove so much as give it a jumpstart.”

“You seemed perfectly capable to me.” She was mildly surprised that no bitterness even threatened to leak into her voice on that one.

“The problem wasn’t really a lack of competency. I never miss. Never have, never will. It was more a lack of following the directions.”

“You disobey?” She didn’t even try to hide the shock, letting it color her voice and narrow her eyes. Men like him didn’t exist her world. Men like him were executed as boys.

Though – wasn’t that the point? Nothing she knew had happiness or peace. If she was going to find any, she was going to have to look outside her world. And Barton? Barton was as far outside her world as you could get.

Now she just had to solve his secrets and get out in time. Get out before the bad omen of her presence infected him.

He was talking again. Responding to her expression of shock.

“It's not deliberate! Well, _sometimes_ it’s deliberate. The rest of the time, things just go to shit.”

She was familiar with the mantra.

“I mean,” he added with a grin, “I was supposed to kill you, wasn’t I? Look how spectacularly _that_ went to hell.”

She’d forgotten.

No, she hadn’t forgotten. It just hadn’t occurred to her since the warehouse. And it wasn't in a “he’s a professional and I’m a professional so let’s just let bygones be bygones” way. Rather, the idea that Barton would try and kill her was suddenly incongruous with reality. Trying to even imagine it felt wrong.

It felt even more wrong several hours later when she was awaken by a sharp noise at the foot of her bed. She sat up quickly and found that Barton had done the same – which was probably what had woken her – and was looking around frantically, trying to find his place in the real world that his nightmare had so unceremoniously dumped him in.

He didn’t have a weapon nearby, which should have made her relax, but somehow the tension in his swiveling neck made her own muscles tighten in sympathy. Then his eyes alighted on her, finally having distinguished the reality of her, and he smiled. Really, truly smiled. The way someone smiles at a close friend at an unexpected meeting in a store or restaurant.

Happiness. Deep and raw, spread thick across his face.

 _So it is here,_ she thought with relief. _Now I just have to follow him long enough that it rubs off. Long enough that I can echo his movements and find myself in the same space._

“Sorry to wake you,” he said in the half-darkness.

“No problem,” she answered. “I’m sure it will be my turn soon enough.”

If either of them noticed, in the spell of the witching hour, that the implication was an anticipation of many more nights in the same room, neither of them mentioned it.

***

Those nights were not, however, to start immediately.

“You want her to what?” Clint laughed. He knew Coulson was being serious, but the invoked image was ludicrous.

“I don’t want her to do _anything_ ,” Coulson corrected. “Not officially. I want _you_ to help instruct a field training. I want _her_ to be standing next to you when it happens. If students ask, she’s there to help train, but please, for the love of everything, don’t actually let her indoctrinate our tiny precious newbies.” He nodded at Natasha. “No offense.”

“None taken,” she shrugged.

Now that he’d acclimatized to the original image, he had to admit, he could see the appeal of the plan. Natasha, well trained for assassination and ops, was still unfamiliar with the subtle differences between countries and programs. This would expose her to a training environment without actually mixing her with the other trainees. At the same time, it was a position that wouldn’t draw too many eyes.

Clint glanced back at her. “You ok with this?” he asked.

She raised one eyebrow and answered, “ _I_ , unlike some people in this room, actually follow my orders.”

Clint laughed once at the same time that Coulson said, “Barton! Do not teach her whatever it is you do. I swear, if she falls off _one_ roof while she’s with you…” He trailed off, shaking his head with pursed lips.

“You might be out of luck on that one,” Clint responded. He glanced back again, meeting and holding Natasha’ eyes for a half second.

_What you say_

“I promise not to do it on purpose,” Natasha compromised.

_I will echo._

“You promise that now,” Coulson said with a bland smile. “But I advise you not to make predictions regarding your behavior if you’re going to be spending a lot of time around Barton.”

“I’m feeling real loved here,” Barton scoffed. “Anything else you want to add? I’ve helped with this course before, so I’m good on questions. You good, Nat?”

She startled at the nickname, but kept her composure enough to say, “I’m good.”

“One more thing,” Coulson added. “If I could have a moment alone with Romanoff?”

For an odd moment, Natasha thought Barton was actually going to refuse, which was ridiculous since the order didn’t even concern him, but he ended up just nodding and turning to leave. He gave her an encouraging smile and a “I’ll wait in the hall,” and then he was gone.

In his absence, Natasha considered the man sitting across from her. His simple and inexpensive suit gave nothing away, and neither did the carefully constructed expression on his face. The various Captain America nick-knacks lying around were more revealing, speaking to a hero-worship mentality, but even that wasn’t much to go by.

“How are you feeling,” the man asked her.

Natasha considered all her options. The truth was, she felt like she was drowning. The truth was also that she’d jumped into the ocean without a life raft, so she really hadn’t expected anything else.

“I’m feeling as well as can be expected.”

“That’s fair enough,” Coulson smiled. “Now I feel compelled to inform you that I could get you someone to talk to. If you’d like. We have some skilled psychologists here, and they’re all very trustworthy.”

“No thank you, sir.”

“I thought you might say something like that. Might I tempt you with the fact that voluntary attendance at such a meeting would definitely endear you to the bureaucracy of the SHIELD system?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“Well, at least you’re polite about it. All right. Beyond that, I just wanted to make sure that you and Barton were still compatible. You’ll get nights apart while in the field over the next few weeks, but your waking hours will still have you two side by side. That kind of thing can be a strain on the nerves.”

“I’m well equipped to deal with a strain on my nerves, sir. Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m going to worry about you, Romanoff. Barton is currently my Agent, and, as far as I’m concerned, that makes you my responsibility by default. And I take my responsibilities to heart.”

“Understood, sir.” If he wanted to worry about her then she’d just have to work twice as hard to prove herself. Barton obviously valued this man’s opinion, that much was clear by the way he stood while around the senior Agent.

_What you say is sacred_

“So are you two still getting along?”

_will be my sacred._

“Yes, sir. I anticipate us working very well together. Equal skill levels, but differing skill sets. Filling in each other’s weaker points.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned weaker points. He was looking at her strangely, telling her _something_ was off about what she’d just said.

However, when he spoke again, all he said was, “Ok. Tell me if that changes. You’re dismissed unless you have any further questions.”

Natasha slipped out of the room with a brief bow of her head.

The whole not-following-orders thing had her a little concerned. She’d sworn – to herself and everything important to herself – that she’d follow him exactly; at least until she figured out where the parts of him that let him be happy were. If that meant she was going to have to disobey orders, it wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be very uncomfortable.

“You doing ok?” he asked her, pushing himself off the hallway wall he’d been leaning on.

_If there are times that he doesn’t want us to follow orders,_

“I’m fine,” she answered with a smile.

                                                                                               _then I won’t follow them._

It would be months before the two of them would find themselves in a situation where that promise would apply. When the moment did arrive, however, the deceptively simple words would carry a heavy weight of consequence.

***

“Ug, it’s cold,” Clint whined as he stepped out of his car. Natasha had already walked around and was standing impatiently at the trunk of the car.

“You’re kidding me,” she laughed, watching Clint shuffle along, hands tucked into his armpits. “It’s almost 13 degrees Celsius.”

“How are you even functional,” he grumbled.

“You better _get_ functional,” she teased. “You’re teaching the range today, aren’t you? I think that’s going to require you to demand a little more respect than you’ll get with an angry glare and your arms folded around your body.”

“It’s cold,” Clint muttered again, more plaintively, but he did manage to get his hands into his pocket to unlock the trunk.

“Yes, it is,” Natasha placated, pulling her duffle out. “So cold. You’re a champion for making it this far. Let’s ignore the fact that I’m in shorts. It’s not relevant at all.”

“Oh my god I hate you. And you better change out of those before we head out to the range. Shorts are just as unprofessional as hugging yourself.”

“I don’t know about _just_ ,” Natasha smiled sweetly.

“You are asking for me to barricade your room from the outside tonight, you realize that, right? You realize that that’s what you’re asking me to do?”

“I’d hear you coming from a mile away,” Natasha scoffed, slinging her bag over one shoulder and walking toward the cadre building.

“You didn’t hear me coming when I shot you,” Clint muttered, and then seemed to think better of it, slowing his step and watching her for a reaction. Rather than flinching or glaring – reactions that Clint had expected – she turned slowly on her heel and fixed him with a mock-shocked expression.

“Agent!” she gaped. “I hadn’t pegged you for a sore winner!”

“Then who the fuck have you been talking to?” Clint crowed. “I’m the _worst_ winner.”

***

By the time they got out to the weapons range, the sun had come up and the cold desert was quickly turning hot. It was only nine in the morning, and already the still and muggy climate had Clint and Natasha both sweating. Clint took a grim and sullen satisfaction to the fact that Natasha didn’t seem to be holding up under the heat as well as she had under the cold. Especially in the long cargo pants.

“All right class,” Clint shouted out over the shuffling feet, adjusting his grip on the rifle in his hand. “I’m going to take you through the range safety rules.”

Natasha was standing behind him off to his right, and he could see her lengthened shadow falling out across the dirt, running parallel to his.

“If you’ve heard them before,” he continued, “then stow your sense of entitlement, suck it up, and listen to them again. Rule number one! Never point your weapon at something you don’t intend to shoot. I don’t care if it’s loaded. I don’t care if it’s on safety. _Don’t do it!_ If I see you taking a selfie, with your weapon pointed at someone else’s head…” He twisted around to Natasha, intending to aim the weapon at her head to demonstrate the position he’d just described.

Except, Natasha wasn’t exactly aware of his intention.

Clint swung the rifle around toward her, and she moved. His first indication of the coming motion was her shadow. It flashed in the corner of his eye, as he was keeping his gaze on the group of young students, and then it folded on top of his. That was the only warning he got, and his heart skipped a beat. Then she was on top of him, one hand on the wrist holding the weapon, and the other at the junction of his neck and shoulder. He felt the shift and push of her weight, and her legs were around his waist and his face was in the dirt.

“For the love of _fuck_ , Nat!” he spat, careful to keep his muscles relaxed and nonthreatening. “I was just demonstrating!”

She laughed, low and calm, from somewhere outside his field of vision.

“I think it was a good demonstration,” she purred. “You said, ‘don’t aim at things you don’t intend to shoot,’ right? Well, this is why. If you don’t shoot, you lose your advantage, you lose your weapon, and you lose your life.”

“That is _not_ the lesson I was teaching them,” Clint muttered, his ears burning from how quickly he’d been taken down. At least she’d pulled out some impressive moves to do it. Getting his legs just swept out from under him would have been worse.

“It’s a good lesson, nonetheless,” she murmured, so close to his ear this time that, for a incongruous moment, he thought she was going to kiss the top of his ear. He could feel the warmth of her breath.

And then she was off him, and he flailed around in the dust for moment and sprang up quickly to his feet.

“Apparently,” he shouted out at the wide-eyed crowd. “The first lesson was actually, ‘don’t aim anything at battle hardened assassins.’ So…keep that in mind, or whatever.”


	5. Sensations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *whispers* I'm sorry it's so short. I was in the field all week.

Clint’s heart dropped into his stomach when he came around the corner and found Natasha standing in the center of a horseshoe of female trainees. Her legs were widened in a defensive stance, and her hands in fists up in front of her face. The only reason he didn’t break out into a full dead sprint was because the girls were leaning forward eagerly, utterly still. And Natasha was talking. Clint doubted she talked much when she was at her most dangerous.

Nonetheless, he approached them more quickly than his usual walking pace, greeting them when he was within speaking distance.

“Morning Barton,” she responded, while the group chorused, “Good morning, sir”.

“So, what’s going on here?” he opened cautiously.

“A few of the girls wanted to know if they could use their breakfast hour to have me show them some extra combatives.” Natasha had a small smile on her face and an unexpected pride in her eyes, and Clint felt a sudden temptation to just keep walking.

But Coulson had been remarkable specific.

“Ooo, yeah, sorry to break up the party,” he said instead, “but I can’t let you sacrifice your breakfast hour. Not to mention Romanoff needs to eat, too. So, head on back to the show tent.”

Natasha didn’t say anything to counteract the order, but her smile did fade quickly. The two of them watched the group of girls walk away toward the tent, dejection obvious. Natasha waited until they were out of earshot before she turned on her heel to face Clint.

“I was sticking to _verbal_ instruction, Barton. Even I know better than to touch that with a ten foot pole. I was being careful. I was being _good_.”

“Sorry, but I can’t just let that kind of thing happen. Coulson specifically said not to ‘indoctrinate’ them. That word specifically.”

“And you think I can do that just by teaching them a few fighting tips?”

“Yes. Can you really look me in the eye and tell me that your life philosophies don’t alter the way you fight? That you can’t find your dedication etching into the way you scratch and bite and kick? Because I find my truth in the way I hold my bow. I suspect it’s the same for you.”

Natasha sucked on one side of her bottom lip in annoyance while he flared at him, but didn’t negate the claim.

“Now, I don’t mind pleasantries,” Clint continued. “But I really don’t want to have to monitor your every word. I’d rather just trust you to leave them alone.”

“I accept the situation, but I still think it’s ridiculous. We’re not going to be here long enough to make that kind of an impression.”

“You’re underestimating the effects of a willing mind. These trainees are here to eat everything we give them, and they’re willing to do that because they believe us. Believe _in_ us. These aren’t children fighting brainwashing. These are young adults who believe the things we say.”

Natasha was staring straight ahead with pursed lips, and Clint continued with a sigh, “Back when I was here, angry and young, I had a Senior Agent take us out into the woods on a training exercise. He had each of us handcuff ourselves to a chain that ran around a tree, spaced us out in even intervals.  I remember assuming it was an “escape” simulation. I remember thinking it was a pretty stupid one, because who the hell chains someone to a tree?

There were only five of us, and it was a big tree, so we couldn’t quite reach each other, when we were done. I still remember the feel of the rusty chain. How it felt beneath the rub of our fingers, flecks of it coming off on our skin and under our nails.”

Natasha had turned toward him, intently flickering her eyes back and forth between his - trying to read him like a book - but he refused to meet her eyes. Now he was the one staring out at the wavy horizon.

“Evans was on my right,” he said. “That’s where the instructor started. Kicked him right in the ribs where Evans was sitting, chained and defenseless. Then he just kept kicking. Kicking and punching; really giving him hell. Evans is screaming and begging. We’re screaming and begging. I cry out, ‘sir, I don’t understand,’ over and over for a while. I remember that. He just kept going and going and going. Then, when I’ve honestly resolved myself to watching my friend die, right in front of me, the guy moves on to Petrov. Taking the circle clockwise, away from me. I can’t imagine what it was like for the guys in on the other side of the tree. The one who couldn’t see. They just heard reactions, and Evans is screaming, then silent, then the next guy is screaming. I don’t know what they thought was going on.”

Clint was holding the thumb and forefinger of his right hand around his left wrist – encircling it. “I tried to get out of the cuffs, but they were SHIELD stuff. Special. I might be able to do it now, but I had no clue back then, so I just pulled and screamed until they guy moved on to his _third_ victim, and then I pulled and screamed again. That one was Lily Alwyne, and Lily Alwyne is the one that I gave up on. Call me a sexist, but a girl’s screams are just different, ok? I just curled up, with my hands over my ears and waited my turn. No one was screaming but Alwyne.”

That’s when the guy stopped. Backed up and walked a slow circle around us all. Those of that could were watching him warily. Then he said, ‘The most important lesson you will ever learn is that sometimes there’s just nothing you can do.’ Then that was it. The end of his lessons, just like that. He let us out, and we dragged our injured back.”

There was a long pause, the kind of pause that exists in the moment after you breathe out and before you breathe in again.

Then Clint startled out of his stillness and said, “He got relieved of his teaching position, of course, once the story got out. Turned out to all be because of him having watched his partner die a few months back. But it doesn’t matter, you know? Because I never forgot that lesson. It’s going to follow me until the day I die.”

Natasha reached out to where Clint was still gripping his own wrist – now in a white-knuckled grip – and gently but firmly pulled his fingers apart from each other. A jagged white scar – seen a hundred times but never _noticed -_ ran the circumference of the archer’s wrist. The leftovers of the handcuff’s kiss against the thin skin.

“That’s not what he taught you,” she intoned, tracing the line with her fingers. While he had avoided meeting her eyes, he laser-focused on the path of her fingers.

“His lesson didn’t end up being about powerlessness,” she continued. “No matter what he wanted. Instead, he taught you that friends are weaknesses, because he hurt them right up until the moment you stopped trying to defend them. He taught you that your presence gets other people hurt, because he never even touched you.”

She turned her arm to show her own wrist, where a thicker and more jagged scar circled in a similar pattern. Several years of soft slits rather than Clint’s single traumatic slice. But no less clear. No less permanent.

“To keep us in our beds,” she murmured. “To keep us still. To keep us where they left us last.” Her smile twisted bitterly. “To just plain keep us.”

He circled her scar with his fingers, as he’d done his own a few moments ago.

“Look like we both have some lessons to unlearn.”

***

Clint was sitting on his cot, tossing the tennis ball at further and further targets, bringing it back to himself with more and more bounces and increasingly complicated trajectories.

Coulson was the only other person he’d told that story to. He hadn’t meant to go all the way with it, intending for a light-hearted approach to the anecdote. But the whole thing had seemed so natural, coming out of his mouth. Like the story had been aching to be told.

Purging. Purifying.

***

“I’m bored,” she announced plaintively. She was leaning backwards against the shoulder-high wooden fence and kicking her feet in the dust. Clint was leaning next to her in a similar fashion, but he was focused on the clip-board in his hands.

“What do you expect me to do about that?” he sighed, half-expecting a smart-ass answer and half-expecting a real one.

“Give me something to do. Please? There’s got to be _something_ in this god-forsaken desert that I can do.”

So, mostly serious. He glanced up at the flat expanse, filled with dust and young maybe-Agents. If they made it through the next four weeks, they’d graduate to choosing between the different SHIELD academies. But – Clint narrowed his eyes – only if they learned to keep their _weapons in arm’s reach_. He glared at the offending trainee, and was struck by sudden inspiration.

“Ok, here’s something you can do. I’ve got a game for you.”

She perked up immediately, raising one eyebrow and saying, “ _You_? Playing _games_? Are you sure you’re capable? Aren’t you the _picture_ of consistently professional grace?”

“There’s the smart-ass version I’ve come to know and love. And yes, I have a game. Go and get as many weapons as you can. They’re supposed to be within arm’s reach of their owners, so play by the rules, at least a little. If it’s within the limits, don’t touch it. But if not? It’s fair game.”

“You want me to steal weapons from newbies? Do you have any idea how easy that’s going to be?”

“High and mighty there, aren’t we? Yeah, that’s what I want you to do. Teach them a lesson. Terrify them. I want them to come back from the bathroom to get their rifle, thinking no one would notice if they leave it for ‘just a second’, and it’s just vanished. Play a ghost.”

“Play a ghost?” she laughed. “I _am_ a ghost.”

“Aren’t we all,” Clint murmured under his breath, returning his attention to the clipboard. Some of the trainees had failed their marksmanship qualification, so he was taking them out the afternoon for some one-on-one.

Gods, this really was nothing like Operations. SHIELD played this first round nice and slow – to make sure the science kids made it through – so those aiming for Field Agent had one hell of an awakening coming.

Still, it made sense to at least make sure the geeks of the crowd knew how to fire simple weaponry. He didn’t really mind taking them out for some personalized training.

His mind drifted away, thinking through the plan for the day and trying to organize the names on his list. He didn’t really look up again until he heard the quiet clunk of a rifle being leaned up against another. He glanced up to find Natasha leaning the rifle in question against a stack of…. _one, two, three…what the fuck??_ Four others. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He really hadn’t been focusing on the clipboard that long.

“Uh,” he began, wondering if this kind of thing would get her in trouble. Or him. Snagging one or two to make a point was one thing. There were some instructors who would probably think it was funny. But there were some real assholes who would consider it a breach of authority. And if she kept up this pace…

“You said it was a game,” she responded quickly. Defensively. Like she could tell he was about to backtrack on the game.

And it was a game, wasn’t it? He’d practically told her to have fun. How many times in her life had she just been allowed to have fun?

“Go get ‘em,” he said seriously, and the smile that reached all the way up to her eyes was 100% worth any kind of a dressing down he might get later.

She ended up with thirty-two. Or, thirty-three, really. The game was ended when one of the weaponless-trainees came to sheepishly ask for her weapon back. It got the attention of one of the Senior Agents, who came over to see what the fuss was. Unfortunately, it was one of the assholes.

As Clint had predicted, he threw a bit of a fit, talking about levels of authority or something like that. Clint honestly wasn’t paying attention. He was watching Natasha who – after a few minutes of listening to the speech with a look of disgust – gently slipped the Agent’s M9 out of his holster, tucked it into her pocket, and quietly walked away.

Thirty-three.

It got the whole FOB thrown into a lockdown, of course. And that ended up lasting several hours, until the weapon was finally found on the latrine floor. But the forced searching was entirely worth the look on the man’s face as the weapon was returned to him by the young trainee who had found it.

***

That night, when Clint was tossing his tennis ball around the room, Natasha slipped in through his window, falling to the floor softly.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he reminded her. “Bad impression on the tiny trainees.”

“Then I was never here. But I _did_ get a picture of Mr. High-and-Mighty when that trainee said he’d found his sidearm in the latrine.”

“Show me,” Clint ordered, laying the tennis ball next to him. Natasha crawled up onto the cot with him, and they sat side-by-side, with their backs to the wall and their feet handing out over the long edge. Natasha pulled out her phone and passed it over.

“I got a pretty good one of you in there,” she added. “Got your face when you realized _where_ the sidearm had been found.”

“It was a beautiful moment,” Clint grinned, cocking his head partly to the side as he looked at the photo. “I owe you for it.”

“Hell yeah, you do,” Natasha laughed. Neither of them noticed the tennis ball had fallen down onto the floor. It bounced a few times and then rolled underneath the furniture. Forgotten. The room’s occupants were too busy bending their heads close together over the tiny screen. Natasha had one hand in the curve of Clint’s back, keeping her placement against him. Clint had one hand braced down on the bed by her hip, keeping himself steady.

The muscles in their fingers tightened imperceptibly at the contact against the other’s clothing, but they were too absorbed in the moment to catch the subtle shift within their own bodies.

Clint surfaced enough to consciously realize that Natasha smelled like the earth. Not the gritty sand that had clung to their bodies since they’d stepped out of the car, but the way the air smells when you’re miles away from civilization.

He cocked his head to the side again, forgetting to flinch away when her hair brushed his neck, and laughed at the image of himself on the screen between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's technically still Saturday, okay????


	6. Warmth

The march was what changed everything. Natasha had been hanging in a weird limbo – made of trust and distrust – and it had been bordering on too much. She’d been pulled too many ways and not enough directions. And then the march happened, thank all the gods.

Which, looking back, made her seem calloused, considering everything that happened. It had probably been a terrible experience for a lot of people. A few more uncontrollable variables, and trainees would have died.

Still, she couldn’t help but be grateful. Sometimes, you just really need a life-or-death emergency to happen.

One of the last thing the trainees had to do before the end of their first week was complete a ten mile march. The first group started just as the sun came up, and they had to make it to the end. No timer, because hey, the sciences ones had to actually _make it_ to the science school.

Which wasn’t the problem. No one who had made it this far was going to have a problem hiking ten miles, no matter the weight in their backpacks.

Natasha and Clint were stationed at the four mile point, complete with a water refill station and a dip tank.

Which wasn’t the problem. They had plenty of shade, a beautiful view, and nothing to do. Natasha entertained herself by taking a gratuitous number of selfies, and trying to get candid pictures of Clint. Even better, her implant had been reset so that the entirety of the training base was open to her. For the time being, Clint was no longer her leash.

Off to the side was a truck that another Agent had driven up and left for them, either for emergency purposes, or to come back in once all the trainees had passed.

Which was a little bit of the problem, but it wouldn’t come into play until the whole disaster had already started.

“Damn it’s getting bad out here,” Clint sighed, stretched out in the shade of the truck. He’d already stripped down to his white tank top, spreading his arms out to his sides to try and lose as much body heat as possible.

“You’re getting dust all over you,” Natasha informed him dryly. Honestly, what was the point of wearing white if you weren’t going to be somewhere where dust got the serving staff fired.

Still, sweating it out in her own stupidly-dark pants and blouse, she was seriously thinking about joining him in the stripfest – what was the point of anywhere on this planet getting this hot? And it wasn’t like she couldn’t get her shirt back on quickly enough to assuage prying eyes. They had a clear view of the land around them for nearly a mile.

And it was that thought that turned her back out to the horizon. To be able to see so far, over an hour in. They should at least be able to see the runners headed their way. The born-to-get-into-Operations people. The legacies. The ones who would one day dig knives out of their comrades’ dead bodies to use as weapons against the enemy.

But there was no one. Just the flat hazy desert as it slowly passed 40 degrees Celsius. Waves of heated light, traveling up toward the sky until the sand looked like a sea of glass.

“We’re four miles out from the start point, right?” she confirmed.

She kept her eyes on the horizon, but heard Clint shift his arm around to look at his watch. Then she heard him slowly get to his feet and fetch the binoculars out of the truck. So, she’d been right then. They should have seen someone by now.

He came to stand next to her, and then scanned the horizon, handing her the binoculars.

“Shouldn’t you be the one to use these?” she scoffed, putting them to her face anyway. She put them to her eyes quickly, though it didn’t help. She caught a brief glimpse of a coyote, followed it for a half second in a vain hope, and then went back to her slow half-circle.

“I see just fine from a distance. And I don’t like being constricted like that. Held down to such a narrow point of view.”

“There’s no way you can see just as far without them,” she retorted, turning around and scanning the opposite horizon, just in case they’d suddenly become completely incompetent and gotten completely turned around.

“Feel free to think what you like,” he answered. She lowered the glasses to turn and look at him again. He was standing completely still, barely even breathing in the enveloping heat, and focusing down across the land without so much as blinking. As though he was willing the space in front of him to fold in on itself. To just be closer.

Something flashed, behind his eyes, and then it was gone, and he blinked quickly several times.

“Nothing,” he said to her silent question, and rubbed the grit out of his eyes. “There’s nothing out there. And there should be. Someone should have been out ahead enough to be here long ago.”

“What do they do in case of emergency,” she said, already all business. She hadn’t been hanging around SHIELD long, but she already knew how careful they were with their trainees. Everyone knew how weird SHIELD was with their trainees.

“We are the emergency protocol,” he answered, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll call it in, and they’ll get birds up in the air.”

“If they’re being attacked, their window is pretty small. Most of them wouldn’t be able to fire a weapon under pressure.”

“They don’t have ammo on them,” Clint murmured, as he dialed.

“What the fuck?” Natasha snapped.

“Training accidents are a big deal ok, we didn’t want them out there with loaded weapons. Have you seen that Fitz guy? He’s an accident waiting to happen.” He pulled the phone away from his face and looked down at it with a scowl. “Why the fuck do I suddenly have no signal?”

The question made her stomach drop as her body filled with adrenaline, and she was already in the truck before she knew it, twisting the key while her foot smashed at the brake viciously. If SHIELD trainees died out there today…well, she suspected a untested ex-KGB asset would be too good to pass up as a patsy, no matter what was really going on out there.

Why was nothing happening?

The stupid truck wasn’t even making a noise. There was no click-click-click. No attempt. No effort.

She flew out of the truck, reaching down to swing her own backpack up onto her back. It had water and a _very_ basic first aid kit. Nothing that would help in a real emergency. The phrase “better than nothing” was a mockery of the useless thing.

“Hey,” Barton yelled, as she darted out on her first steps. “Where are you going?”

He’d climbed up into the truck and was making his own attempt at coaxing it to life. It wasn’t any use. The starter had gone bad for sure. They would need a tow truck to move the thing at all.

“You need to go get another vehicle,” she called back, slowing to a stop. Her feet were itching to _run run run_ , but she supposed disappearing into the wilderness wouldn’t do wonders for her reputation with SHIELD. “I’m going to go see if I can help.”

“Natasha,” she said, and she could _hear_ the stupid placating tone there, buried underneath his own worry.

“Something is wrong, _Clint_ ,” she snapped, echoing the intimate usage of her name. Which was strange. She hadn’t used his first name since the beginning, and the taste was different in her mouth. The “t” clicked softly in its own syllable.

“I know something is wrong, that’s why—”

“I’m faster than you,” she cut him off. “I’m better in close combat. I have more versatile life experiences.”

“You do not,” he muttered.

“I am the best tactical choice to go for them,” she continued, ignoring his interruption. “You have my word that I won’t harm them. You have my word that I will do whatever I need to do to try and protect them. You have my word—”

“And if Coulson asks?” he snapped. “If something goes wrong out there and Coulson asks why I made _this_ decision, what do I tell him? That I got the _word_ of an ex-KGB Russian assassin?”

She stilled her body, turned back toward him so she could look him in the eye, and her body would be aligned with his own. She spoke quietly, but clearly, just loud enough to reach across the distance between them.

“I swear on my new identity. On the girl in the pool. On the girl in the warehouse, aching to be set free. I swear on the boy I saw behind your eyes. Clint. Let me go!”

He seemed to choke on air…and then waved his hand in dismissal. She turned and fled before the gesture was finished.

The sand was painfully deep, prematurely worsening the burn in her thighs. She had to over-tense her muscle just to keep her path steady. Barton would probably try to get that useless truck up again, give up, leave a note for any incoming trainees, and take off for the next checkpoint. It was only two miles out, so he’d probably get there before she figured out what was going on.

 _Radios_ , she thought to herself. _Flares. If they didn’t want to give them loaded weapons, they could have at least given them absolutely anything else._

She made a list as she ran, letting in new points with its rhythm of her steps. It could be an all-out attack. Someone could have targeted the trainees on the day they were the most vulnerable. Which would mean planning with a working knowledge of the training criteria and the schedule and –

She cut off that line of thought and redirected herself. She didn’t care _how_ the trainees were being attacked. She cared _if_ the trainees were being attacked. Worry about back-tracing later.

The desert was sloping upward and she lost a little ground with each of her steps. The effort of running was consuming more of her thought process, and it took a greater effort to divide her mind between her objectives.

So, if it wasn’t an outside attack, an internal one was also a possibility. A young girl in Natasha’s class had clawed a fellow trainee’s eyes out, before ripping out her own throat. They’d said it was an adverse reaction to the serum, but Natalia had always suspected it was just the regime of their training.

Of course, she couldn’t rule out an accident, although she was having difficulty thinking of an accident drastic enough that it would stop an entire class. _Someone_ would have gotten through.

And then SHIELD might have set up some extra obstacles along the course, without telling Barton. However - while she suspected they would gleefully do that to their trainees – she doubted they would take the risk to have equally uninformed trainers running the course.

That car, though. That was an odd cherry on top.

The cell phone, too.

She was going in circles now, coming back to her own logic in a pattern that wasn’t getting her anywhere. Until she had more information, the only thing she could do was head backward along the course.

Move faster.

It was too hot outside. And it wasn’t just her being a Russian. It was too hot. Temperatures like this didn’t make people sweat and pout; rather they killed people. Laid them out with dry skin and violent seizures until even their brains gave up. It was hard to believe that it'd still get so cold at night here that Barton would throw fits.

And here she was, pumping her way through it at a dead sprint.

She considered reaching back for the water in her backpack, but something stopped her. The same feeling that had tickled at her while she’d been staring out at the horizon.

_Don’t drink the water. You’re going to need it._

What on earth would she need the water for? Besides drinking it as she sprinted across the desert?

Against her mental judgement, however, she left it where it was. Her body could take it, and her intuition had saved her life often enough that she didn’t question it too much.

She did, however, force herself to stop thinking. She could feel herself working up into a paranoid frenzy, and her training kicked it. She discarded the problem, having dissected it as much as she could, and focused on her running. Or, rather, on distracting herself from her running.

She began counting her left footsteps by sevens and her right footsteps by threes. She was out of practice with the exercise, losing count frequently at first, but she fell back into the habit quickly enough, and ate up the ground.

***

Natasha had thought it was a starter that had gone bad. She hadn’t said it, but the signs had been there, and the way she’d given up on the vehicle so quickly had been evidence enough. Clint, however, had actually taken the time to pop the hood and pull it out.

It hadn’t gone bad. It had been fucking sabotaged. Strings of plastic that had held some sort of improvised corrosive time-bomb hung down around the block. The starter was completely eaten through.

Efficient. Quiet, but permanent.

He looked up at where Natasha was disappearing. He could still make out the movement of her body as a whole, though the individual motions – like the pump of her legs – was too blurred.

If someone had gone to the effort to incapacitate the vehicle without anyone knowing it was happening, then they clearly didn’t want anyone stumbling across what they were in the middle of.

Meaning Natasha currently held the highest position of danger, already acting in direct opposition to the enemy’s plans. And she was his ward; under his care. He had a moral obligation to go after her and te—

He had a moral obligation to trust her.

She’d made her position perfectly clear, and she’d even given him a job of his own. He turned and took off for the next checkpoint, the opposite direction from Natasha.

Briefly, he imagined what Coulson would say, when the whole thing was finished. But, somehow, he couldn’t imagine the Senior Agent would be very upset with the call he’d just made.

God, it was hot.

***

Natasha had two revelations at the same time. The first was simply the continuation of an earlier thought. It was far too hot. As she'd been running, it had surpassed July heat and headed sharply for Death Valley temperatures. The area they were in should _not_ be like this.

She wasn’t sure what to do with this information when she realized it. So the weather was misbehaving. It wasn't like she could do anything about it.

The second revelation was that there were people on the horizon. She just had one more little hill to go before she reached them, and then she’d have more pieces of the puzzle. With an actual physical goal, she spent the energy for an extra burst of speed, and caught up to the small group of students.

“Agent Romanoff?” one of them panted at her.

She didn’t waste the time to remind them that she was not an Agent, and instead asked, “Why are you three headed this way?”

Because that, it seemed, was the crucial bit of missing information. She could see the pathway that had been beaten down by the previous students, heading in a more-or-less straight line, 90 degrees off from where it was supposed to be going.

Instead of responding to the question, the girl looked down at her map and coordinates. It was her classmate that finally ventured, “Because it says to on the map.”

If the girl hadn’t looked so terrified, Natasha would have thought she was being a smart-ass. But the girls were also realizing what Natasha had realized. It was too hot. They’d gone too long without seeing anyone, and a SHIELD “Agent” had just come sprinting over the closest ridge with a wild intensity in her eyes. Something was wrong.

The questions was what to do next. If she redirected the girls toward the water station, they would have to make it another mile still. And they were clearly on their last legs. In fact, one of the girls actually swayed while Natasha considered. If she sent them that way, instead of seating them in the nearby shade, it meant she was trusting Barton to actually do as she’d told him. To _go_ and get another vehicle.

On the other hand, if she sat the three girls in the shade, they could survive longer in stasis, and Natasha might be able to resolve the issue.

_Don’t trust others with the integrity of your mission._

It had been a harsh lesson to learn, cruelly taught and deeply embedded. And yet...

“Ok, I want you three to head straight that way. Straight azimuth where I’m pointing. In another mile, you’re going to hit a full water tank. Drink and sit down. It’s going to get less hot with every step you take.”

“What’s going on?” asked the shaking girl, and the same time that the one with the map said, “What about the others behind us?”

Natasha stuttered over that one. She was going to followed that path into the woods

_wait for Barton to come with help_

_there’s not time_

_why isn’t there time_

_why do I know that_

“I’ll stay,” the map girl volunteered. “I’m doing better than them. I’ll pass the message along.”

“Good girl,” Natasha answered. And then she was off into the woods.

The shade, it turned out, didn’t make things much better. In fact, the tight branches and the thick underbrush forced her to struggle more. Although there was a general path that had been followed by a few students, it didn’t help the thorns and low hanging branches.

She needed water. It was quickly passing from a general desire and into a intense necessity. She had endured worse, and for longer, but not by much.

The trainees that had been out here for hours had had it worse. They hadn’t been running, but they’d been keeping up the trek for longer. Hopefully, the ring of heat didn’t extend too far outward. The intensity was increasing as she went. If it decreased in inverse, maybe the barely-not-children she was tracing hadn’t been in long at all.

Still. Thank all the gods that Barton had gone the other way.

She heard a slight noise a little to her left and redirected her course, coming suddenly upon two trainees. They had sat down in the dirt and stripped off most of their clothing. Natasha gave them the same instructions she’d given to those before and was relieved when they struggled up on their own. She certainly didn’t have time to stop them.                                                                                                                         _no time_

There was a center to this heat, and it was guiding her.                                   _no time_

Just as it had drawn those she still chased.                                                                                                                                                _no time_

Her tongue felt dry and heavy in her mouth, and she’d long ago stopped sweating.

The cadence in her head matched the pumping of her legs, step by step matched word by word. She didn’t know how much further she had to go, and she’d long ago stopped keeping count of any kind of pace count. She just drew lines in her head.

_I’ll make it to that tree, and then I’ll stop. Ok, now I’m going to make it to that root there, because then I can quit. I can make it to the dry creek bed._

Line after step after word until _smack_ she ran straight into someone, rebounding heard enough to almost fall on her ass.

Cool. His skin was cool to the touch. And not the clammy cool of someone who barely still has their pulse left in their body. Rather the soft chill of ice.

She mumbled to herself in Russian for a moment, trying to force her mind back down to her body.

_This is the center of the storm._

The young man in question wasn’t a stranger either. She recognized him from the base. One of the trainees. And carrying two others on top of it. A fourth was trailing behind, barely on her own two feet.

“Agent Romanoff!” the boy exclaimed. “What the hell is going on? We turned back, but it’s just still getting hotter.”

“Who the fuck are you?” she snapped back. Or, she tried to snap back. It didn’t come out right around her thick tongue, and she was pretty sure part of it had been in Russian anyway. Her hands were starting to shake.

She shook her head, both in a half-response to the boy’s question – _Bobby Drake! His name was Bobby Drake –_ and to try and clear her mind. She reached out with her hands and took the map that one of the Bobby’s passengers – slung fireman style – still clenched in his delirious hand.

She was pretty sure the other was he was carrying was already having a seizure.

She unclipped the pencil from the map and wrote in wide block letters: DROP THEM.

Unexpectedly, Bobby immediately laid them on the ground. He then glanced back over her shoulder toward the girl trailing behind him, but Natasha took him by the shoulder and forced him to look back at her as she wrote again.

RUN BACK TO THE BASE. JUST YOU

_Take your storm with you!_

He looked at her for a moment, and she drew an azimuth down across the map, showing him the straight path back toward the base. It would bring him back to safety if he were somehow a victim, and it would bring him into the hands of more capable fighters if he wasn’t. Hopefully, the Agents there had already been alerted by Clint that something was going on.

Bobby hesitated a moment longer, opening his mouth to object, but closed it again with a click. Then he turned and ran, full tilt, ignoring the branches that lashed at his face.

 _He trusts me_ , she realized. The stupid boy actually trusted her, and it might have just saved people’s lives. Which was odd. When people trusted her, it usually meant they were about to die.

Natasha blinked once, looking around at the two boys on the ground and the slight girl, who quickly joined her classmates lying in the dirt.

 _I should tell them to run toward Barton,_ she thought. _I should run with them. I don’t even know if sending Drake the other way will work. What if this heat isn’t following him? What if I just assumed that? What if I sent him to his death?_

Instead of doing any of those things, she sank to the ground and dug out the canteens she had there. She passed them over to the girl, still lucid, and watched her eyes widen as she realized it was water.

She was clever, too, because she drank slowly. More than that, she began to crouch over her fallen companions and try to coax them to drink, too. She made quite a figure, golden red hair curling out of her ponytail and framing her face as she resiliently forced her friend’s mouth open.

It was the last thing Natasha remembered, before her face hit the dirt.

***

She woke to the persistent beeping that told her she was in a medical facility, and sat with a start, which caused the room to spin violently. She closed her eyes, trusting her body to know which way was upright better than her eyes did.

“Thank everloving fuck,” a familiar voice sighed from her right. She opened her eyes slowly to find Barton sprawled in a crappy hospital lounge chair. He had on the same dusty uniform he’d had when she’d last seen him, and was sitting sideways in the chair, leaning against one arm and hooking his legs over the other.

“You look terrible,” she told him groggily. She had always hated hospitals, but they weren’t too bad when you woke up next to someone who looked happy to see you alive.

“Yeah?” he laughed. “You look fucking _awesome_. The doctors were arguing about whether or not you’d ever open your eyes, and I didn’t like it much. Glad to see you pull through on the right side.”

“Am I in trouble?” she asked. She couldn’t help it, petty as it was.

“No,” he snorted. “ _I’m_ not even in trouble. Everyone’s fine. Even those three kids you found at the end are going to be ok. One of them’s pretty bad, but still going to be ok. Wouldn’t have been without that water. Even Bobby’s looking all right, though there are still a lot of questions. The heat dissipated like the flick of a switch the moment he made the forward operating base.”

“Oh,” she responded. “That’s good. That’s great, actually, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Ok, what did you mean?”

“Am I in trouble for passing out?” She twisted the blankets in her hands and couldn’t help glancing up to read Barton’s face.

Something flashed there, some kind of pain, but then it was smoothed over by a bland pleasantness. “No, Natasha,” and the way he said her voice sounded almost worshipful. “No, you’re not in trouble. You’re a hero.”

At that moment, a doctor opened the door and stepping into the room.

“I heard you two talking,” he said pleasantly, and Natasha was startled to see he had a darkening bruise on his right cheekbone. She was more surprised when Clint stood up suddenly, and shifted on his feet like he was embarrassed.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered, gesturing to the doctor’s injury. “Seriously. My bad.”

“I’ve seen worse tempers,” the doctor said dryly as Natasha glanced at Clint. “People don’t tend to take bad news well around here, especially when it comes to their partners.”

“I’m not his partner,” Natasha said, before Clint could be offended out loud.

“Oh?” the doctor said, glancing over the machines. “Does he know that?”

Natasha didn’t respond, and Clint didn’t say anything either. They let the physician complete his exam in peace, waiting until he left the room to return to their interaction.

“Still angry at the world?” Natasha asked quietly, once they were alone.

“World hasn’t properly apologized yet,” he muttered.

“Oh? And what gift would it have to give you to entice you to accept its apology?”

He didn’t answer, crinkling his face up strangely up strangely instead, making her laugh.

***

The question was unexpected, when she asked it, and his unguarded state allowed the truth to spring to mind before he could catch it.

_You. It would have to give me you._

He shoved the thought down and away to the cold dark place where he kept his anger. Thoughts like that had no place in this world. His grubby fingers had no right to something so delicate.

***

“It doesn’t make sense,” Clint repeated.

“If it helps, Barton,” Coulson sighed, wearing that same bland smile “They didn’t tell me everything that happened either.”

Which meant Clint definitely wasn’t getting told the whole story, even though he’d been boots on the ground at the events. Even though his asset had saved the lives of at least eight trainees from what had been a surgical attack with a set goal. Coulson was level 7, and if level 7s weren’t being told, his pathetic little clearance could jump off a bridge.

“They wanted something in particular,” he couldn’t help trying again. Because there had definitely been a “they.”

Coulson just smiled.

“They controlled the weather,” he whined; a half-hearted last ditch effort.

Still smiling.

“Can you at least tell me if they got what they wanted?”

How did that man hold that facial expression? He hadn’t so much as twitched.

“Let me guess,” Clint said dryly. “I’m dismissed?”

Your papers are on the desk there,” Coulson confirmed. So Clint took them and left.

***

“Looks like we’ve got some time off,” he grinned, glancing through his papers while handing Natasha her own.

“They’re giving me free reign of New York City?” she said in surprise.

“Yeah, that’s where my apartment is. They at least get you a hotel this time?”

She turned the papers so he could see, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Own apartment? Already? Wow, they must really like you.” He leaned in closer. "That's my address. They got you an apartment in my complex?"

“I guess they like us as a team."

'Brought me back down to half a mile from you though," Natasha said, as she continued to read. Her and unconsciously flew up to touch the insertion point on her neck.

"I'll just have to make sure you have a good time," Clint responded. As he stood behind her, his hand reached up to touch his own neck in sympathy.


	7. Fingerprints

They had just gotten back into the city, after a painfully uninformative debrief, and Clint stumbled down the escalator to the subway without really thinking about it. He had to double back to get her pass, once he hit the turnstile, and he was surprised to find her still standing and staring at the map in the middle of the concrete circle.

He didn’t think much of it at the first, tired and hungry and working hard to forget the last several days. The rest of the training session had been moved to a secure location, and the trainers had been switched out for more emergency-prepared individuals. Big guns.

So here he was, blinking stupidly at Natasha until she left the map and followed him into the tunnels. It wasn’t until he caught her muttering to herself, glancing up and down at the maps on the walls, that he figured it out.

“Are you testing yourself?” he asked, and grinned when she ducked her head.

“Yes. It’s a good training exercise, to know how to navigate the city without stopping for reference.”

“Oh, it that what you were doing?” he teased. “Because I could have sworn you were having _fun_ , and we all know you don’t do _that_ , right?”

“I’ve been known to have fun,” she smiled, something in the turn of her mouth communicating how, when she was having fun, there were other people out there who most certainly were not.

“So how’s it coming?” he inquired. He was sitting cross-legged on the bench and squinting up at the map near the ceiling of the car. She’d just been consulting it, but more for shape than for anything else, since the letters were too small for her to read from the bench.

She wondered, as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes, whether it was too far for _him_.

“It’s coming,” she answered. Short phrase with no real meaning, because she hadn’t been paying attention to the question as much as she’d been following her own line of thought.

“Got the whole thing memorized?” he pressed.

“I _have_ been to this city before, remember. I’m really just refreshing some of the names.”

As she spoke, the train came to a slow deceleration, stopping and opening its doors. Before she could say anything else, Clint took her by the wrist and dragged her up and around to the exit, quickly enough that her reaching fingers almost missed snagging her backpack off the floor.

“What was it?” she asked, widening into a defensive stance once they’d stepped out on the platform. She didn’t see anything moving on the train, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something there.

“Test time,” Clint announced with a grin, reaching to cover her eyes. To his credit, he did do it slowly and obviously enough to telegraph his move, and it didn’t trigger any panic.

“Minimum number of stops from here to Grand Central,” he quizzed. Warm palm placed carefully over both her eyes.

“Seven,” she smirked, barely thinking it through. “Although that doesn’t mean anything. Aren’t you always seven stops from Grand Central here?” He could feel the pressure against her eyes as she flicked them back and forth, as though reading the map behind her eyelids.

“That’s right,’ he said, and even with his hand lingering against her face, she could tell he was still grinning stupidly. Then the rough skin was gone, and she blinked once in the dim light of the tunnels.

Clint gave her a stop by name and, for a moment, she thought it was going to be another test. But then he shot out, “Race you!” and was gone.

It didn’t fit with what she’d come to understand about his character. He didn’t seem the kind to test her – to push her – like this. Because with the implant inside her, measuring the steps between the two of them, a race like this didn’t hold the potential for pain and disappointment. Failure meant death. Not that she hadn’t faced tests where death was a potential consequence before. She just hadn’t expected it from Clint.

So she blinked in his absence, wasting a precious second, and then darted for the stairs, got turned around wrong for a moment, and then righted herself just in time to run straight into a large group of tourists.

She struggled around them for a few moments, using her own center of gravity to sidestep those not paying enough attention to their surroundings to notice that they were about to run into her. The rest of the crowd parted fluidly enough, and then she had her path clear again. She took the stairs two at a time, hugging the far wall to avoid another collision with a group of people.

The sun was setting as she burst through the turnstile and out into the dusk. She squinted her eyes and ignored the momentary pain at moving from darkness into the light. The sting of adjustment, because sometimes the first steps are the hardest.

And there was Clint, standing just at the exit and staring up directly into the sun, as though savoring the hurt of it.

“Forgot about the implant for a second there. Was gonna race you home. Why didn’t you say something?”

She licked her lips slowly, tasting the air and considering the way Clint slouched against the railing; defeated even though he wasn’t the one with the chip in his neck waiting to cast irrevocable judgement.

“I thought it was a test,” she said simply, and his eyes shot up to meet hers.

Not defeated. Angry. Trembling with the kind of rage that makes people sloppy and gets partners killed. He was vibrating, from his shaking hands right up to his eyes, held so tight that his eyelids twitched.

“You are _not_ a pre-determined value!” he snapped.

“I’m not sure I understand.” Calm, in the face of his violence. She wondered briefly how he could have been good enough to pin her, when he was full of this much uncontrollable emotion. Wondered, with a thrill of excitement, how good he would be if he could ever overcome it.

“You’re not…you don’t have a price tag!” he snapped, trying to explain. “Your value, your right to life, doesn’t fluctuate with your skill set. If you can’t keep up, you still don’t deserve to die, burning slowly through.”

_What are you so angry at?_

“So where’s this apartment building?” she said, because she didn’t have all the answers to the way she viewed the situation, and she would not have this conversation until she did. She didn’t discuss things like this at a disadvantage.

“Fight back!” he practically yelled, turning heads even on New York streets. Even in this neighborhood and at this time of night.

“Against what?” she asked. “Against you? I don’t think so.”

He deflated, perhaps shocked by the statement, forcing them into a brief and awkward silence. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, humming a single note under his breath - the dying embers of his anger.

Finally he snapped, “The apartment’s a block and a half that way.” He gestured with a jerky wave of his arm, and turned to march down the sidewalk. She followed after, fixated on his steps, watching where he put his feet out of a lack of anything else to do as they walked. She doubted he wanted to talk to her.

The tense silence lasted all the way up till they stopped in front of her door. He paused to wait for her, and she turned the key and pushed the door open.

“Holy fucking shit,” Clint spat, when he saw. The apartment was empty. The wood floor was bare and the windows had no curtains. Even the microwave had been ripped out of its spot above the stove. The wires hung raw and exposed.

“It’s fine,” Natasha rushed to assure him. “I’ll get it taken care of in the morning. I know how to furnish an apartment in the US. And I’ve spent nights in worse places. At least this is dry and safe, you know?” She tried to laugh at the end, because nowhere was safe really.

He didn’t laugh back. Didn’t respond either. Instead, he reached out to put his hand on her shoulder and half-dragged her back down the hall to the stairs.

“Saved a kid’s life,” he muttered to himself as they went. “Might have saved an entire fucking class. What do they say? Go stay in this apartment without so much as a fucking rug. Seems fair.”

She didn’t interrupt his soliloquy, keeping her silence up to the third floor. He had to let go of her shoulder to get the door open, but then he was right there again, dragging her through into what she assumed was his own apartment.

“No place like home,” he muttered. “At least I’ve got a couch, so it’s still better than the hotel.”

He was wrong and right at the same time. This was better than the hotel, because there was a hopefully empty pizza box still sitting on the kitchen counter, and a single flip-flop underneath the couch. The curtains were a deep purple, even though it made his window easy to mark from outside. The whole apartment smelled like grease and pine. This was better because this was his.

And it was worse because, happy as she was to be allowed in, she didn’t belong. Not even sleeping on the couch like a stray. She was always careful to wash the grease off her skin, didn’t own a pair of flip-flops, and had eaten pizza maybe twice in her life, outside of Italy.

She turned in a careful half-circle, unable to shake the feeling that she was missing something.

***

They danced around each other for a careful two days, at the end of which Clint asked, “So, you want to go get your apartment furnished?”

She looked up at him in surprise and answered, “I already did. Used your computer to buy what I needed online. Had it delivered.”

“Oh,” Clint responded, and didn’t comment on the fact that she was still curling up on his couch in the night.

***

Like all peace, it broke unexpectedly.

Not to say that Clint hadn’t gotten used to being given “a couple weeks off” just to have them retracted, but he somehow managed to take it personally every time. He told himself he should learn to roll his eyes at each promise of “vacation,” but he kept falling for it.

He’d been even more sure than usual that the promise would hold, because he’d been wanting to show Natasha around the city. She’d been before, but he doubted she’d done much of the touristy stuff, and that was the best part of New York. Waiting in line for the Empire State Building and watching the family behind you get more and more frustrated. Watching the four year old throw a temper tantrum and the mom gripe about forgetting to bring a water bottle. Buying hotdogs and nuchas from the local venders and pretending not to know how much he was being overcharged.

People being people, completely unaware of the value of their lives. Forgetting that he wasn’t one of them.

While he doubted that Natasha would find quite the same comfort in the pressing hoard of people, he still hoped she’d get a kick out of the aura of it.

But no. He woke up to a text message ordering him to report by noon to the nearest SHIELD facility. He glanced up from where he sat in his bed, tousled and groggy, and saw Natasha was lying on the couch on her stomach, propped up on her elbows. She waved her own phone at him, and raised an eyebrow to say, “ _Looks like we’re back on._ ”

“Sorry,” he mumbled out loud. Apologizing for SHIELD as a whole.

“I don’t mind,” she smiled. “Any chance to prove myself.”

And didn’t that just crash Clint into a wave of guilt. Of course she’d rather be on a mission. Of course she didn’t want to lie around in his crappy apartment and eat greasy finger food and feel threatened by the ten thousand people close enough to her to take a shot. She wanted to be out there, proving her worth. She wanted to earn her way out of the implant.

“Guess they just can’t live without us,” he joked out loud.

“I’m a valuable team player,” she dead-panned. “In high demand.”

***

Their cover was private security temporarily utilizing a down-range military FOB in the Middle East, which barely made any sense to Clint, much less to those stationed at the FOB they were placed in. Their mission was intensely need-to-know, and he and Natasha had been told to hover around on stand-by, until they were needed. If they were needed. Which meant, so far, they didn’t need to know.

“Does it ever bother you, having no clue?” he asked her one day, leaning over his meal and trying not to draw too much attention to himself.

“I think it used to,” she answered, after thinking a moment. She was also attempting avoid drawing too much attention to herself. The base hadn’t been thrilled to learn they were accepting a couple of private security personnel, especially ones with no announced purpose. It had created an air of hostility that left the two assassins – attuned to the aura as they were – to live in constant discomfort.

It wasn’t anything either of they couldn’t handle, but it did create odd habits, such as eating too quickly and avoiding the natural ebb and flow of social congregation.

“What made you stop caring?” Clint pushed.

She shrugged. “I don’t think it was any one thing. You just can’t spend all your energy on the little concerns. The payout isn’t worth it, and I wanted to survive. Unlike some people, I have learned to pick my battles.”

“I know how to pick my battles,” Clint pouted. “I just pick all of them.”

***

It was so hot. While it didn’t nearly match the temperature she’d endured just a week ago, it didn’t mean she was comfortable. After working out or occasionally wandering into town to walk about the more commercial areas, Natasha had usually sweat so much that her clothes stood up on their own, stiffened with salt and dirt. The heat maintained a constant cloying presence that threatened to suffocate her.

She fought through it. She reminded herself that she it didn’t matter what she wanted. She was here to follow, to obey, to repeat the words she was told to repeat, endlessly, until such time as she figured out what she wanted.

She fantasized, sometimes, about that. She couldn’t remember ever particularly wanting anything. She imagined, that when she figured it out, she’d be a force to be reckoned with. She was already so dangerous, wandering aimlessly through the haze of other people’s orders, that a true purpose would probably turn her into something truly savage.

***

The orders, when they finally came down, almost came down too late. After months of easy peace in the city, insurgents had suddenly declared themselves to be a presence. Fighting broke out, with gunfights taking place almost hourly. Everyone was on edge and pissed, because no one knew how the enemy had gotten into the city or how long they’d been there.

When it was discovered that they were holed up in a hospital, a sudden debate broke out. The locals insisted that the hospital was being used unwillingly. It had been taken and held. Innocent people were inside, and they wouldn’t be allowed to leave. At the same time, with live fire coming through the windows, the building was officially allowed to be targeted.

Angry and over-eager and scared all at once, those in charge argued with rising tempers among a rising number of wounded. Their role two was already almost as capacity. “Mass cal” was on everyone’s minds.

However, at the last minute, a sniper team managed to get into a position that let them take out all three of the machine guns that had been holding the main street inaccessible. Suddenly, taking the hospital by foot didn’t seem like such an impossibility.

Clint and Natasha watched the debate rage on without offering any input, as per their orders. Rather, they viewed it as a particularly interactive movie experience, listening to the intermittent sounds of open fire down the way. Clint felt like they should have popcorn.

Which was when Clint got the message: _have them blow the hospital_.

He twisted the phone to show Natasha instead. When she read the message, she snorted and said, “It’s way too late. Where was that order 30 minutes ago, when tempers were high and their soldiers were dying?”

Clint quickly typed out, “better late than never does not apply here, the attack is already off” and shrugged. He certainly wasn’t going to contradict her outright, but he suspected she could probably come up with a way to get the hospital blown to pieces if she wanted to. He didn’t mind though, because he didn’t want to do it either.

The response, unfortunately, was: _then do it yourself_.

“What the fuck,” Clint sighed. “I know that our job is sometimes tasteless, but I would have liked a little time to mentally prepare myself for this one. I guess they’re serious. You got a plan or do we need to spitball here?”

He glanced over to find Natasha had pulled her knees up to her chest and was holding her ankles loosely. A defensive position, worsened by the set of her jaw and the way she was looking out at the hospital on the horizon. Not contemplating possible attacks; just staring.

“Natasha?” he ventured.

“I’ve blown up a hospital before. I’m just not looking forward to repeating that particular experience.”

Which was the “fuck it all” moment for Clint. He’d already been entertaining the idea of “failing” the order. It didn’t sit right, so massively different than anything SHIELD had ordered him to do in the past. Hearing her quiet distress was the extra weight to put him over the tipping point.

“Then we don’t do it,” he shrugged.

“Says the boy without an implant in his neck.”

“That’s not to make you comply with them,” he spat back angrily. “That’s just to make sure you don’t kill anyone. It’s stupid, but it’s what they do. They’ll take it out eventually.”

He knew the words didn’t carry any weight. She’d been held under a dead man’s switch for too many years of her life to believe it was so easy to get released from one.

So he compromised.

“How about we go in? See what the fuss is all about and figure out why they want us to blow it. Seriously, something’s isn’t sitting right with this whole thing, and I don’t want to do it. If we go in and find something good enough to waste the innocent lives, then follow through. Otherwise, we bail.”

“We bail?” she echoed. “And then what? Head for Aruba?”

“I was thinking Tahiti,” Clint grinned. “I’ve never been, but another Agent once told me it’s a magical place.”

***

“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Natasha muttered, as they finally slipped into the building. Getting through the streets hadn’t been a piece of cake, and their adrenaline was high.

“You didn’t want to blow up a hospital,” Clint grunted as he shimmied through the window Natasha had just gotten though. “So we’re going to try and find a reason to not blow it up.”

He shifted through enough that his center of balance shifted, and he pinwheeled his arms suddenly. To no avail. He lost his balance on the sill and tumbled into the building and onto the floor. He took most of the weight onto this shoulder blade, turned it into a roll to avoid any damage to his person, and then sprawled out on his back.

“Thanks for helping me,” he said dryly up to Natasha.

“ _I_ didn’t need any help,” she replied innocently. “Didn’t realize you would. My bad.” But she still leaned down to offer him a hand up.

They didn’t have time for anything more, as the sound of footsteps arrested their conversation. The hospital wasn’t bustling, as they suspected it normally was, clearly shut down by the insurgents. However, they didn’t mean no one was going to come across them. In fact, it simply made it more likely that whoever ran into them would be heavily armed.

“Now what?” he asked quietly, after they’d ducked into a supply closet.

“What do you mean now what?” she shot back incredulously. “This is your idea. Unless you mean ‘now what’ in the most literally temporal sense – in which case the answer is ‘pray no one opens this door’ – then I don’t have anything for you. This is _your_ plan.”

“This isn’t my plan! This is our plan! Own up!”

“You literally dragged me into this. I didn’t have--” She cut herself off suddenly, as the footsteps got close enough that neither of them felt comfortable enough to continue talking. Then, as they faded away again, she continued, “--a choice because you are the most pigheaded man I’ve ever met. How have you worked with a team in the past? How has that functioned at all?”

“I didn’t!” He snapped. “We’d do a team mission and everyone around me would say ‘please don’t ever pair with me with psycho ever again.’ That’s how it went.”

Natasha shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the most obvious display of discomfort he’d seen from her in a while, and her mouth turned down.

“What?” he finally asked, exhaustion evident in the way he let out too much breath as he spoke.

“I’m familiar with the situation.”

“People wouldn’t work with you?” He both believed it and didn’t.

“I scared them” she said simply.

“Well, yeah. You scare me, too. Seems like a crappy reason not to work with someone, though. I like the idea of my partner being terrifying. Seems like a good skill set. Me?” He gestured to his whole self, and grinned. “Not so terrifying. Pretty cute, though.”

Natasha smiled obligingly, letting it be convincing enough that Clint’s grinned widened. To herself, though, she thought he was wrong. Even in these few short months, Clint had more than proved himself capable of terrifying.

***

The search was almost fruitless. They poked around a bit, more for show than anything else, but didn’t see anything out of ordinary for the situation. It wasn’t until they got all the way down into the basement that anything interesting happened.

After all, secret doors rarely meant “boring.”

Natasha was the one who found it. They’d worked their way down from the top floors, trying to stay sequential as much as the roving hostage situation would allow. Finally, they were in the lowest level of the basement, and talking more freely now that they didn’t anticipate any interference. Nothing was down there. Not even a broiler.

“Hey,” Clint said suddenly, the thought about the broiler bringing it to mind. “Have you seen any electrical boxes or anything? It just occurred to me, we’ve been everywhere, but no wiring or evidence of wiring.”

“Weird,” Natasha agreed without really paying attention. She was staring intently at the wall. Clint did a quick 180 to look for anything that could catch and keep his attention, but just ended up back at Natasha. Who had somehow opened the wall.

“What?” he said.

“Found a button,” she answered, by way of explanation, and disappeared down the staircase. Clint followed after, amazed at how deep it seemed to go.

“We couldn’t have destroyed this with the artillery they have with these units. Hell, an airstrike wouldn’t do much good for this. Look at these walls.”

The place was built to last, and it showed.

They continued following the hallway, coming to linger briefly in a control room of sorts. It was empty, and the panels looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. However, their origins didn’t appear to be local to the area. The first clue was a generic American design about the set-up. The other, more disturbing, clue was the giant SHIELD insignia painted in white on the wall.

Neither he nor Natasha commented on it, passing it by without so much as a second glance. Their feeling about the entire escapade had sunk from generic discomfort to avid fear. Something was here, and they’d walked too far down the path to not see it to the end.

One of the hallways branching off the console room had huge tubing follow it, so they picked that one and walked further in. Further down.

Natasha brought them to an abrupt halt soon afterward. Clint almost asked her what was wrong, but then she sidestepped about one of the humming cooling tanks that had begun to line the hallway. Just as she disappeared, a lone man came around the corner at a brisk pace. He had a revolver clasped in his right hand and, as he strode purposefully toward Clint, he raised it with intent.

“Ooo, that’s gonna hurt,” Clint sighed, just before Natasha emerged from the shadows. She did something with her thighs where she ended up upside down for a moment, and then the man was on the floor and his gun was in Natasha’s hand.

“Want this?” she asked in a bored tone of voice, as she handed the weapon up the Clint.

“Yeah, thanks,” he accepted, with overdone enthusiasm. He trained the weapon on its original owner, and Natasha obligingly climbed off him. The man was already shaking. He’d appeared prepared to kill, but he didn’t seem to be as equally prepared to die.

“Get up,” Clint ordered. When the man didn’t move, Natasha repeated the phrase in Arabic. Still no response, so Natasha started though a few languages.

Unexpectedly, they finally got a response out of German, and the man stood. Clint spoke again, keeping to the German, and ordered their hostage to lead them to “the center” of facility, hoping the man would have some clue what that might be. As they walked, Clint’s phone rang.

SHIELD phones. Better signal than Verizon.

He shifted the revolver to his right hand, and pulled out the phone with his left. The screen simply read “unknown.” So, nothing new. Only SHIELD personnel had the number anyway.

He flipped it open and held it to his ear saying, “Uuuh, Barton here?”

”Barton!” Coulson’s voice exclaimed through the phone. “Did you blow the hospital?”

Clint glanced up at the man he was holding the gun on and said, “No?”

“Thank god. Clint, do _not_ blow the hospital. Whatever you do, do _not_ blow the hospital. We don’t know how that message got to you, but it didn’t come from SHIELD.”

“That’s fabulously comforting,” Clint snarked, afterward mouthing to Natasha, “ _hacked communication lines_.” She rolled her eyes and mouthed back, “ _Of course_.”

“Where are you right now?” Coulson continued.

“Um. We definitely aren’t in the hospital. If that’s what you’re asking. Totally not in the hospital. Wouldn’t go near the thing. Too dangerous.”

There was silence on the other end, which was odd because Clint had really laid on the sarcasm. He hadn’t meant it to be difficult to figure out where they were. However, before he could speak up and clarify, Coulson spoke, slowly and clearly, obviously making a great effort to be heard.

“Clint.”

 _“First name_ ,” Clint mouthed to Natasha, and she looked suitably impressed.

“Do not open the container.”

“What container?” Clint asked, just as they came into a main chamber. There was a huge metal container taking up most of the space, minimum thirteen feet tall. It was metal and cylindrical and covered in rust. It screamed old age and lack of use.

“Oh, that container. How’d you know we’d find a container?” Now the thing really had his attention.

“I imagine it’d be hard to miss. Do not open it.”

“Coulson. Coooooulson. I’m definitely going to open the container. You know this.” As he spoke, he gestured at the man with his gun, clearly indicating the man should help him do just that.

“Don’t do it, Barton.”

Clint fake-winced at Natasha, mouthing, _“oops, lost the first-name basis_.” She gave him a thumbs up.

It was too late anyway. After short work from their hostage, the giant container was slowly swinging open. While allowing enough attention to remain on their unwilling assistant, Clint shifted position to peer inside. Natasha did the same.

“You are _not_ opening that thing after I just said--”

“Too late.”

“Barton. Barton, don’t take what you find in there at face value. It’s not what it looks like. At the very least it’s not what you’re probably going to think.”

“What. The. _Fuck_!” Clint exclaimed suddenly, and Natasha made a soft noise of surprise a moment afterward.

“Barton. Clint, it’s not an uwill--”

Clint hung the phone up with a snap of his wrist and stared into the container in silence. Even their guide seemed stunned, looking down at the contents in confusion.

“Not what you expected?” Clint asked him quietly.

Inside the cylinder lay a girl. Young, no more than twelve, and clad in what looked like a pale hospital gown, contrasting with her dark skin. She was lying on her back, black hair in a circle out around her head. She looked asleep. Or dead.

“Clint,” Natasha said from behind him, sounding strained. “Clint we can’t leave her here.”

“Well, _yeah_ ,” Clint responded. “Help me get her out. Grab her other side.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, unfortunately I'm going to have to put this story on hiatus. I'm starting second year, I've changed my mind about some plot points, and I've discovered I really really hate working under a weekly deadline. So I'm going to pause this one, finish writing the whole thing, and then get back to posting (at a faster rate than weekly). Thank you for your patience.


	8. Stains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you thought I was never coming back to this. (I did too, I was very scared.) HOWEVER! I've returned with a completed outline and every intention and getting this done ASAP. Thank you for your patience, and I hope it lives up to any expectations.
> 
> And again, thank you to [hawknat](http://hawknat.tumblr.com/) for her beta read, especially since it has been seven months since either of us looked at this fic. (Yeah, seven months. Wow. I really abandoned this one and didn't look back, huh?)

The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen. That was the point that was sticking in Clint’s mind. Since he’d hung up his phone so abruptly, Coulson had been calling him back non-stop. It had been at least fifteen minutes, and the guy had to know that Clint was stubborn enough to keep this up forever, but still he kept calling back.

The girl in question, the one who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, was currently curled up in a tiny ball as far away from the container as Clint had let her get. She hadn’t said a word since she’d opened her eyes with a snap, and she was keeping her face buried in her arms. Her hair was like a cloud, aiding her shelter. The white outfit – _uniform, it looks like a uniform_ – she was wearing contrasted with her dark skin, and Clint could help the stray thought that it would dirty, if she sat on the floor like that.

Natasha was dealing with the single guard they’d found down in the hallways. “Dealing with” meaning grilling the guy for any information he might have about the situation at hand, and the sharp German words drifted through the rooms, rising in anger and then falling into lilting persuasion as Natasha played with the man’s mind.

Clint turned his attention back to the girl.

“Hey,” he called softly. “My name’s Clint. I’m, um, here to help?”

He winced internally at the way his voice trailed up into a question, but the girl did grant him a slight reaction. She turned her head the tinniest fraction of an inch, but it was enough that Clint could see at least one eye peeking out from where her face was otherwise buried in her knees.

“See?” he asked, grinning triumphantly. His phone was buzzing again. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? I don’t bite.”

“That asshole doesn’t know anything,” Natasha spat, stalking violently back into view. The girl reacted by hiding her face again, and Clint pursed his lips in annoyance.

“So why is he here?” he asked.

“Hell if I know. He was just as surprised to see the girl as we were. I think he was just as ‘need to know’ as we were.”

“You’re sure he was surprised?” Clint confirmed.

Natasha snorted once, and Clint rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “My mistake. I’m sure you’re sure. Anyway, any idea what’s next?”

“Well, it’s your call, but I’d answer my phone at some point.”

The damn thing was ringing again.

“I don’t want to,” Clint stated.

“Okay,” Natasha responded, not even putting up a fight on the matter.

The four people sat silently for while after that. The girl had gone back to her statuesque stillness and Natasha was staring at the underground facility architectural structure with an unlikely interest. Their prisoner was secured and trying to keep from reminding anyone he was there.

And Clint? Clint was coming to terms with the fact that he was stuck. There were a lot of guys with guns up above him, and he and Natasha had barely made it into the hospital when they weren’t dragging a traumatized girl behind them. Getting out now wasn’t going to happen. He was also getting the nauseated feeling that the guard they had tied up might be innocent in the entire ordeal. If anyone was guilty at all. He glanced up at the machine they’re pulled the girl out of. It wasn’t like they knew what it did. What if it wasn’t doing anything bad at all?

“No way,” Clint said suddenly, as though he was continuing a conversation, “I know we don’t know what’s going on, but look at her? That thing has to be bad, right?”

“We don’t know the whole story,” Natasha said slowly, but she didn’t seem convinced either.

“There’s a SHIELD logo on the wall in there,” Clint reminded her. “Whatever this is, it’s us.”

“Yeah.”

Clint’s phone was ringing again. He pulled it out of the pocket he’d shoved it into and stared at it, mesmerizing himself with the soft glow and low hum of vibration. He deliberately waited until it stopped ringing, and then quickly speed-dialed Coulson. Petty, but the only power he had under the circumstances.

“Agent Barton,” Coulson snapped. “Don’t you ever dare ignore m--”

“No!” Clint interrupted with a snap. “I want to know why there’s a traumatized girl sitting ten feet from me. I want to know why I pulled a teenager out of a fucking metal tube in what is clearly a SHIELD facility. In the middle of a fucking warzone, nonetheless!”

“Nikkya,” Coulson said softly. “Her name is Nikkya.” Then, even more quietly, “She’s traumatized?”

“Well, she’s not talking, and she’s in a little curled ball, so I’m going to go with fucking hell yeah.”

There was that anger again. Simmering somewhere and urgent to break out. He swallowed it quickly, for the sake of the kid across from him. He pulled the phone away from his ear and called softly across the room again.

“Nikkya?”

The girl jerked sharply and turned her face again, more than last time. Now Clint could see both her eyes, staring at him.

“You okay?” he asked.

Nikkya shrugged.

Stupid fucking question anyway. Clint put the phone back to his ear.

“Yo,” he snapped. “What now?”

“Yo?” Coulson repeated wryly, and even Natasha was looking at him with a raised eyebrow. He took a page from Nikkya’s book and shrugged noncommittally.

“Don’t fuck with me right now,” Clint sighed.

“Don’t fuck with _you_?” Coulson snapped right back. “Don’t _fuck_ with _you_? Barton, do you have any idea how pissed I am right now? What you’ve fucking done? I had no idea that girl was down there until fifteen minutes ago. Something is going on, and I’m desperate here. Isolated. Your communication lines were hacked. I just discovered there’s a secret SHIELD project involving a young girl and possibly human experimentation. People are not returning my phone calls, someone just tried to hack _my_ computer, and _you_ pulled a stunt like turning off your fucking phone?”

Shit. Coulson didn’t swear very often. Not a good development.

Someone had tried to hack his computer?

“I’m not just pissed, Barton,” Coulson continued. “I’m livid. I trust you to be a good agent, and you’re supposed to trust me to be a good handler. But no, you took one look at a situation I asked you not to walk into, and you decided what had happened, without the slightest moment for me to explain.”

“I--” Clint started, but then fell silent of his own accord. Shit, why could Coulson always make him feel three feet tall?

“Can I take from your silence that you’re finally listening to me?” Coulson said coldly.

“Yes, sir,” Clint muttered, his anger sputtering out as quickly as it had come. Again. Still repeating old patterns like he was seventeen and listening to his brother lecture him, fresh from getting his ass saved out of juvie.

Natasha, for her part, was pointedly not looking at him, and Clint got the distinct uncomfortable impression that she could hear Coulson through the phone. She was definitely sitting close enough.

“Good,” Coulson said, voice still like ice. A pit was forming in Clint’s stomach. He’d fucked up again. So much for being a new man and turning everything around.

How many times had he made that promise to himself anyway?

“Your extraction is moving into place,” Coulson continued. “Bring the girl and whoever else was down there and go to the stop of the stairs. Four minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” Clint repeated again.

He didn’t have a chance to hang up before the line clicked dead.

“I don’t think we were supposed to tie that guy up,” he said, jerking his head toward their prisoner.

“He’ll be fine,” Natasha said calmly. “It’s not like I hurt him.”

It didn’t make Clint feel any better.

“She’ll be fine, too,” Natasha added.

Somehow, that made Clint feel even worse.

***

Clint was standing at parade rest getting his ass handed to him. Natasha was somewhere on his left, standing in a similar position, but Coulson wasn’t being subtle about who he was more pissed with. At least it seemed to be winding down.

“Sir?” Natasha ventured quietly. And she had the tone of voice _down_. It was measured and respectful and exactly the right volume and fucking hell Clint would never be able to pull that intonation out of his ass like that.

“What is it Romanoff?” Coulson sighed. Because of course he wasn’t mad at her. She’d performed spectacularly.

“I was wondering, is the girl all right?”

Coulson’s lips twitched, but he actually answered the question with a quick nod, following it up with, “She’ll probably be fine. Getting yanked out of that machine wasn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to her, but she’s recovering from the shock nicely.”

_I thought I was helping_ Clint thought to himself, but all he said out loud was, “What was it doing to her?”

Coulson rounded on Clint and that cold over-controlled anger was back in his eyes before Clint could finish his breath.

“You have done nothing to convince me that’s information you should be made privy to,” the older Agent said. He was speaking calmly, but in a tone that had no room for argument. “Whatever mission may or may not have been going on down there was none of your concern, nor were any reasons it may or may not have been terminated or compromised. This entire situation was already delicate as china, and you decided to approach it with your typical bull-in-a-china-shop finesse. If you think that I’m going to make a security clearance exception for you after the shit you pulled yesterday then you’re more delusional than even you think. Am I clear?”

It was a punch to the gut. Clint was used to getting his ass handed to him by Coulson – it was just the way it went with their relationship. But this was something else. Clint must have stepped in some real next-level shit.

“Yes, sir,” Clint responded quietly. He had to fight the urge to hang his head. “Sorry.”

“You’re dismissed.”

Both Natasha and Clint were almost out the door when Natasha spoke again, in that same goddamn respectful tone of voice she’d used before.

“Sir, one question. Is that guard I tied up all right? I probably owe him some form of apology.”

Clint felt the deep weariness of his mind spread a little further. Natasha had been a ruthless weapon of unnamed psychotic forces not a month ago, and she was already quicker to sympathize with those around her than he was. Even after his years of being within SHIELD, it hadn’t once occurred to him to check on the status of the German guard they’d abused.

“The guard?” Coulson echoed.

“Yes, sir,” Natasha answered, and Clint continued to reprimand himself as he dragged his eyes up to Coulson’s face.

Except…there wasn’t an expression there. Nothing. None of the anger or annoyance that had been so evident before. It was just the smooth façade of indifference Clint had come to associate with security clearance and “need to know” activities. The “I don’t know what’s going on but hell if I’m going to let you know that” face.

“There wasn’t a guard,” Coulson said.

Clint’s eyebrows shot up and he stepped in carefully. “Um, the guard I had Natasha tape to a pole. The one we interrogated? That only other guy that was pulled out with us during the extraction.”

There was a long uncomfortable silence as Coulson seemed to try to decide whether or not to speak. Eventually he said, “There’s no record of anyone else coming out of there except you two and Nikkya.”

It was only because Clint had worked with the man for so long that he saw the there-and-gone confusion that pinched Coulson’s face before that same bland emptiness returned.

“You said someone tried to hack your computer,” Natasha said slowly. It wasn’t really a question, but the offer for it to become a question was there.

“You’re dismissed,” Coulson repeated, the mask settling in further.

Clint stepped all the way back into the hallway behind him, drawing Natasha with him. They didn’t speak again until they were several steps away.

“Is that normal?” Natasha asked.

“Not even a little bit,” Clint snorted. “I haven’t ever heard of an attempt on a Senior Agent’s personal computer, especially one where they didn’t find whoever it was. I mean, forget the fact that they’ve someone lost an entire person, I’m more concerned about the attempted breach.”

“How do you know they haven’t caught whoever it was?” Natasha asked, as they slipped into the elevator at the end of the hall.

Clint glanced up at the security camera now in their faces.

“You work with anyone long enough,” he said, “and, I don’t know. You just start to pick up on which things are bothering them the most.”

***

Without any further orders – verbal, electronic, or otherwise – Clint and Natasha meandered their back to their New York apartment, waiting for any instructions to do anything else. Clint had already started to think of it as “their” apartment, which was a problem all on its own, but it was a problem for another time.

All things considered, the nightmare that night was kind of inevitable. Interactions like that with Coulson tended to trigger old memories and, even though Coulson had never raised his hand in anger, Clint woke screaming from a nightmare than had mixed his handler and his father in a way that left him trembling and half-convinced he needed to check his body for bruises.

“You all right?” Natasha asked quietly from his doorway.

Clint took a few rasping breaths and shot her a grin that was more bitterness than humor.

“I’m fine,” he spat. “I’m always fine.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said. “I’m always fine, too. I know the feeling.”

Of course she did. He was being ridiculous, sitting here in his own cold sweat and trying to get rid of images that hadn’t been real in over a decade. The woman standing a couple feet away had only broken free a few months ago, and she’d done it with seeming effortlessness. He hadn’t heard her wake with a cry in all the nights they’d slept so close to each other.

He was pathetic. Whining brat.

“Sorry,” he said, calming his breathing by force of will. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh. Okay.” He couldn’t really think of anything else to say to that.

“Is it someone who did something to you or something you did to someone else?” she asked, in the same quiet voice she’d been using the whole time.

“Does it matter?” he shot back wearily, collapsing back against his pillows. The ceiling fan above his head was spinning lazily, but he could barely feel it. The sheets were wrapped around him too tightly and they’d been pulled out of their place a long time ago. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d slept with sheets that had been tucked in properly. Probably an indication of how long it’d been since he'd washed them.

“Come watch the sunrise with me,” Natasha commanded softly. “I already made coffee.”

Clint would have objected, but she’d already disappeared from the doorway by the time he’d sat up. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand being wrapped in his filthy sheets anyway, so he kicked his way free and got to his feet. He paused a pull a shirt on, but kept the just-boxers look for the rest of him.

Natasha handed him a cup of coffee the moment he was through the doorway, and he found himself following her as he took a sip that was a little too deep for something so hot. He made a face that was half-pain and half-disgust.

“You don’t have any filtered water,” Natasha said. “You’re supposed to pour over with filtered water. Plus, heaven knows how long you’ve had those grounds. That’s why it’s gross.”

“Then why’d you make it?”

They hadn’t walked to the window of his apartment, but had meandered over to the front door. Clint thought about saying something, raising some kind of objection about how they were supposed to be staring out at the dark horizon and waiting for the sunrise, but the concept of speaking was suddenly as exhausting as the thought of washing his sheets.

He kept his silence, taking another careful sip of the sludge that had once had the potential to be coffee. Natasha was right. The grounds were old. They probably hadn’t even been fresh when he bought them.

He followed her silently up the stairs and out onto the roof – _right, sunrise_ – and then to the edge of the flat expanse. The stars were already disappearing in the threat of the coming morning, and dawn’s chilly breeze was already sweeping between buildings and over the stained concrete of the city.

“What do you think it is?” Natasha asked.

Clint made a noise that was half inquiry and half empty response.

“I mean, what do you think is going on at SHIELD?” Natasha clarified. “You said this wasn’t normal, so what do you think it is?”

When Clint just blinked at her, she continued on her own.

“I mean, there’s clearly some kind of leak. Probably a big one, too, if they’re managing to hide something as complicated as an entire overseas project. Maybe a small rogue faction? They might have been involved in whatever operation I was supposed to be helping with.”

She glanced at Clint, but he just closed his eyes and turned his face into the wind, letting it wash away the feeling of sweat. He could feel goosebumps chasing themselves up and down his bare legs and his body bit back a shiver.

“That first day?” Natasha added, as though he wasn’t responding because he didn’t remember. “When those men infiltrated SHIELD? And I was supposed to help? Do you think that was part of it? I mean, they had to have gotten in somehow.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Clint finally said, opening his eyes.

There was no expression on her face in response to the harsh and undeserved response he’d just given her.

“Okay,” she said. Still that same exact same tone of voice.

“I’m going back downstairs,” he said blandly.

If he didn’t go back downstairs he was going to drop the mug in his hands to shatter on the concrete beneath his feet. He was going to slide his fingers into her hair and drag her mouth in toward his own. He was going to gasp and try to suck the energy from her body into his own the same way he would try to suck her bottom lip into the space between his teeth where he could bite it softly.

“Okay,” she said.

He wondered what it would take to drag a loss of composure out of her perfection.

But then, he knew the answer to that, didn’t he? He’d done it, stuck in that warehouse, both of them bleeding. Vulnerable and ready to die.

How had she gathered herself up from that moment and forced herself onto a solid foundation? Where did she get that strength from? Was is someplace that he could learn to find for himself?

_Who am I kidding_? he thought harshly, as he turned and walked back to the stairs. _She’s just strong. That’s who she made herself. You can’t do what she does. You don’t have it in you._

“Sorry I fucked up,” he said, without turning back around. “I know you’re looking to prove yourself so you can get that kill switch out of your neck. Sorry I keep fucking that up for you. I bet you’ll be fine, though. You’ll do it in spite of me.”

Then he was on the dark staircase, letting the door swing shut behind him.

***

Natasha watched the door until it clanged shut, and then she turned back out to the horizon again.

For a moment, she’d been convinced that Barton was going to kiss her. It had been in that moment just after he’d re-opened his eyes and before he’d spoken, and then it had been gone.

He was so tired. That much had been obvious, unlike the rest of his thoughts, all mixed up and tangled behind a door shut so tight she didn’t have a chance of opening it. For all her years training to read thoughts behind eyes, she just kept finding herself standing in the dark with him.

She was stretching him too thin.

She wasn’t used to being a burden, and the thought settled uncomfortably heavy. She’d thought – back when they were at the FOB with the trainees – that she was doing all right. They’d tucked their heads in together and laughed at stolen photographs.

She’d been happy. They’d both been happy. She’d felt relief washing her clean inside, because there _was_ hope there. There was something different and new, waiting for her to figure out how it worked. It was just matter of time.

Her hand strayed to her back pocket, brushing the phone tucked in there. She’d been taking candid photos of Clint was she knew he wasn’t paying attention, and she’d been hoping they could laugh about them at some point.

But of course not. She’d obviously missed some part of the equation, and there was no hope of recreating the moment. It had been a stupid idea.

She let herself wallow in the grief of her failure for a count of five. Then she took a deep cleansing breath, and prepared to go at it again.

She’d been serious in her vow. She was following this boy until she learned how to be happy or until she died trying. Or until Barton decided that he couldn’t deal with a shadow trailing behind him and making everything in his life more difficult.

She turned on her heel for the staircase. There was a little shop that opened early not two hundred feet from the apartment complex. She’d get fresh ground coffee. She could do that for him, at least. Try to prolong the amount of time he’d put up with her.

She wasn’t bothered unduly by the potential of an approaching deadline. She’d worked under the shadow of a noose before, and she wouldn’t let it affect her now any more than she’d let it in the past.

***

The next several weeks were surprisingly languid. They actually got the time off that they’d been promised before the emergency call-in to the disaster of a mission, and they put it to good use.

Clint noticed that Natasha had bought fresh coffee and he felt a surge of guilt that he couldn’t even provide quality food and drink for the woman he was supposed to be helping adjust to a new life. She’d had to go and get it herself. But that thought managed to drag him out of his own head for a while. They went on a full-fledge shopping trip, getting real food ingredients that filled his fridge more full that it probably ever had been.

And then, of course, they didn’t eat a bite of it for lunch, but instead headed out and bought hot empanadas that burned at their fingers and made their breath blow out thin steam.

Clint caught Natasha’s phone pointed at him at one point, while his mouth was stuffed full bread and meat and a sauce that was dripping down his chin. He almost spat the mouthful out in the effort to get the phone from her, and he only managed at all because she gave in and handed it to him with a smirk.

His eyebrows shot up and he choked out nonsense around his mouthful of food when he flipped back through to find over a dozen unflattering candid shots of him. Suddenly he was laughing way harder than was warranted by the situation at hand, but there wasn’t a chance of him stopping.

“What is this?!” he exclaimed, intelligible only by context. “What!?”

When he finally gave her back the phone it was covered in sauce and crumbs but she shoved it back in her pocket without a hint an annoyance, and then smugly began to stuff her face with her own empanada.

***

The stillness couldn’t last, of course. Not that either of them would have wanted it to. They had a good week. Neither of them woke to nightmares. Clint finally got to show Natasha what it was like standing in line for the touristy attractions. They ate fresh bread in the early hours of the morning. Clint cried for no reason under clean sheets and only knew that it wasn’t because he was sad. They made Spotify playlists and Natasha named all hers in Russian and Clint labeled his 1-17 with no other identifying features. Natasha cooked food from all over the world. They made coffee with fresh ground beans and filtered water, drinking it still hot and without leaving it till it burned on the percolator.

The email, when it came, was not unwelcome. They’d stretched their legs and learned to fall into easy silence with each other. They were ready, already starting to rustle around in restlessness.

“Ready to try again?” Clint asked. He was sitting at the counter drinking coffee and eating a fresh croissant. He shoved the laptop he’d been looking at so Natasha could read the email, and she smiled around her own mug where she was holding it to her lips.

“Second time’s the charm,” she said.

“Yeah,” Clint snorted. “Here’s hoping.”

He shot off a reply to Coulson containing nothing but “We’re ready.”

He hoped the Agent was still pissed enough at him to consider that disrespectful. He probably should have added “sir” there on the end. Or signed it, at least.

Less than a minute later he got his response in the return email. It had the attached and encrypted mission file, downloading to the SHIELD laptop slowly as it fought with the crappy internet.

The message itself contained only the words, “I very much doubt it.”

“What is it?” Natasha asked, mouth full of croissant as she walked around the counter to read over Clint’s shoulder.

“I don’t know yet,” Clint replied, clicking uselessly on the file that was still downloading. “Whatever it is, Coulson doesn’t seem to think we’re ready for it.”

Natasha didn’t have a chance to reply before the file finally opened. The first page stared up at them, containing the mission codename and a single color photograph. For a moment Clint couldn’t understand what he was looking at. It was a series of concentric circles, mostly red and silver, with a single star in the middle.

“Is that a shield?” Natasha asked, cocking her head to the side.

Clint’s eyes widened as he glanced up to read the mission’s codename.

 

**Operation Reanimation**

 

“We are so not ready,” Clint breathed.


	9. Pictures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sings quietly under my breath* iiiiiif I keep posting chapters that are only 4k long then it's gonna take a whole lot looonger to finish this than 20 total fucking chaapters

 

 

“They found him in the ice?” Clint repeated.

Natasha shot him the first annoyed look he’d seen her give him, and he sighed heavily. He’d been told a hundred times by now, but it still felt like he was being lied to.

“Okay, fine,” he conceded. “I will accept this ridiculous bullshit as truth for the foreseeable future, but why are being told about it? Hell, we don’t have enough clearance to get briefed about missions we were _actually there for_. Why are we being let into the biggest development to rock SHIELD in the last three decades?”

“Director’s preference,” Coulson said, and there was an odd twist to his mouth when he said it.

“As in Director Fury?” Clint asked.

“You know any other directors?”

Clint glanced back at Natasha, but she just shrugged like she couldn’t care less. Meaning finding out what the fuck was actually going on was on his shoulders, and his alone.

“Why?” he demanded again, turning back to their handler. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Ask the Director,” Coulson said, and yeah there was definitely a little smirk hidden on his lips that time. Clint didn’t have time to address it before he sensed a presence behind him, hairs sticking up on the back of his neck. He spun on a dime and found himself practically face to face with Director Fury himself.

“Afternoon,” the man greeted calmly. “I was wondering if you and Romanoff could give me a moment.”

“Uh, sure,” Clint said, having to double check that his mouth wasn’t hanging open in some kind of awe-fear amalgamation.

“Of course, sir,” Natasha breathed easily, and that was probably much closer to the proper response.

Director Fury didn’t seem to mind though, and he smiled pleasantly enough.

“Excellent,” he said. “Because, I was hoping to talk to you about something I like to call the Avengers Initiative.”

***

“I forgot I brushed my teeth and then drank orange juice this morning,” Clint said to Natasha, as they stood side by side. “Yesterday I was playing with my phone while I was sitting on the toilet, and I stayed there for so long my legs fell asleep.”

They were in the room with the warm pool where Clint had watched Natasha take seven men down in about five seconds. Where they’d baptized themselves.

“I had a mission a few months back where I almost blew my cover because I got French and German mixed up in my mouth,” Clint said. They both  stared down at the water where a block of ice was floating, encasing the scientifically thawing Captain Fucking America.

“At least now we know what they built this room for,” Natasha said.

“Nat!” Clint snapped. He stuck his arms out in front of him and waved them vaguely at the water, keeping them straight as he moved them. “There is a goddamn person in the water in front of us who was born in 1918.” He paused his movement for a moment, and then wiggled his arms more violently. “1918!”

Clint let his arms drop to his sides with a soft smack of fabric against fabric. He didn’t say anything else for a while. He just stood and listened to the bustle of scientists and machinery around them. The water was eerily still for all it held a living – if not breathing – human being.

“You okay?” Natasha asked after a while.

“Absolutely not,” Clint answered quickly. “Did I mention the toothpaste and the orange juice thing? I don’t understand how Fury thinks that I’m someone to put on a team like this.”

“When you were on your mission with your French and German mishap, I was actively working against this organization with a singular destructive commitment to ruining everything SHIELD works for. I was the unstoppable force. I don’t understand what _I’m_ doing here.”

“Aw, Nat,” Clint began, but she rolled her eyes and shook her head, interrupting any further commentary.

“But I understand why you’re here. You’re standing there thinking about cellphones and toothpaste, but I’m thinking about that unstoppable force. You said SHIELD didn’t even have a real photograph of me, yet you subdued and brought me home in less than a day. That makes you the immovable object. So you can stand there and be all confused as to why they want you, but I assure you Barton, I’ve already figured it out.”

Clint couldn’t really think of anything to say to that, so he stared down into the water and let his eye drift over the blurs of red, white, and blue.

***

Natasha tipped her chair further back as she stared at the computer screen in front of her, placing the balls of both feet on the edge of the desk. After her little speech to Clint earlier that evening, he’d fallen silent, seemingly uninterested in further conversation. She could only hope it was because he’d been listening to her, rather than that opposite.

She considered tipping her chair even farther back, all the way to the point of imbalance, inviting a short fall to the floor behind her, knocking the breath out of her body. But she just blinked once and kept watching the security footage.

Natasha hadn’t been particularly impressed by Fury’s speech about the Avengers Initiative. She’d heard impassioned speeches and idealized objectives before, and they’d usually come at the push of some higher dignitary that had been pulling strings from behind the scenes for so long that they’d forgotten what it felt like to shoot straight. Teams were the sum of their parts, and nothing more.

Steve Rogers, though.

Steve Rogers was…something else. She backed the security footage up again, having to readjust her weight ever so slightly as she moved within her precarious position. She’d been flipping back and forth between the footage of Steve Rogers just after he woke up to the footage of Steve Rogers just after he’d been briefed on his out of time experience, trying to compare his face. There was no difference. That was what was getting to her. A man who had just figured out that he’d lost seven decades of his life should have _some_ kind of reaction written there.

She forced away the concern etched lightly into her face as she heard Clint’s footsteps down the hallway, obviously heading toward the otherwise empty computer room.

“Still going over that?” he asked when he entered. The words were around a mouthful of whatever protein bar he’d snagged from the cafeteria. “There’s not that much footage, and we’re going to meet him tomorrow anyway.”

He crossed the room to her, taking the back of her chair in his hand. It tipped the balance of it slightly, putting her weight in his hand, but she didn’t mind.

“Looking for anything in particular?” he asked.

“I think he’s like us,” she said, feeling Clint still behind her as she spoke, still chewing on chocolate and peanut butter.

“Like us, how?” he asked carefully.

“Lost.”

Clint snorted. “Well, yeah. He’s fresh out of World War II.”

“No,” Natasha said softly, letting Clint keep the weight of her balance in the chair so she could lean forward and brush the eyes of the figure on the screen in front of her. “I think he was lost long before now. I think he was lost before his ship even hit the water.”

“Okay,” Clint said, thinking the situation over. “So let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Go,” Clint repeated. “Go meet him.”

“We’re scheduled to have a two hour debrief with him tomorrow,” Natasha said slowly.

“Yeah, I know. Two hours sitting across a conference table from him while Nick Fury himself directs the conversation. No thank you. Let’s go now.”

“He’s in lockdown.”

Clint snorted.

“Yeah, I bet he is,” he said. “I also bet it takes you ten seconds to get rid of that particular problem for us.”

***

It took Natasha a little longer than ten seconds, but the sentiment behind the claim stood.

Steve, to his credit, did not appear overly concerned when he returned to his room and found two assassins lying uninvited on his bed, side by side.

“This mattress is softer than the ones they give us,” Clint said.

“Trade you,” Steve responded. There was another beat of silence, and then he closed the door behind him.

“Clint Barton,” Clint introduced himself, waving one hand while still lying on the bed.

“Natasha Romanoff,” Natasha said, at least having the etiquette to sit up and look at the man she was speaking to.

“Steve Rogers.” He walked across his room to the chair facing the foot of the bed.

“Yeah,” Clint snorted. “We know.”

“I’ve been getting that a lot,” Steve said, sitting down. He leaned back, hands folded in his lap with his elbows on the chair’s armrests, and he didn’t let his pasted-on bland expression slip even the smallest bit. Set on edge by the silence, Clint sat up alongside Natasha.

“Now what?” he asked.

“You’re the ones who broke into my room,” Steve said. “You tell me.”

“Don’t look at me,” Natasha scoffed, jerking her head toward Clint. “This was his idea.”

“Traitor,” Clint said.

“Several times now,” Natasha returned pleasantly. Then she turned to Steve who had been watching the exchange with quick eye movements and not a single change of his facial expression.

“Let’s try again,” she said. “Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton. The two people apparently about to be assigned to your team. They’re calling it the ‘Avengers,’ though I somehow doubt they’ve already mentioned it to you.”

“I’ve had the concept of the Avengers mentioned to me,” Steve said. “Though no one mentioned it being ‘my’ team at the time. Unless you’re referring to the generic possessive that can be claimed by anyone on a team.”

“What?” Clint asked.

“He wants to know if he’s in charge,” Natasha translated, and Steve’s mouth twitched into an almost-smile at her bluntness. The first real expression he’d given them.

“Not exactly what I was getting at,” Steve said dryly.

“You were going to going to be getting at it eventually,” Natasha quipped back. “And yes. As far as we can tell, you’re supposed to be in charge. Anthony Stark was a candidate, but they’re saying he might not even be invited at all, now that you’ve shown up.”

“Why?” Steve asked.

“Why is Tony Stark no longer a candidate?” Clint asked with a smirk.

“No. Why am I in charge?”

His entire demeanor changed as he asked the question. Like a thrown switch or a cracked glass, Steve’s expression twitched from calm disinterest into authoritative intrigue. He leaned forward fluidly, placing his elbows on his knees and fixing Clint with a piercing look. Staring straight ahead with an unflinching patient gaze.

Clint had been stared down by plenty of people – both by those he respected and by those he didn’t – but this wasn’t quite that. This wasn’t a battle of wills. You can’t have a battle of wills when one party isn’t even fighting back.

 _Because of that,_ Clint thought to himself. _Because you could tell me to take a bullet right now, and I wouldn’t second-guess it till it ripped me open._

“Because the other options are all shitty ones,” was what he actually said. “There’s me, Natasha, and the probably-not-invited Tony Stark.” He glanced at Natasha and added, “No offence.”

“None taken.”

Steve was leaning back in his chair again, though the quiet intensity hadn’t faded completely.

“Why would you two make shitty leaders?” he asked.

“Oh, buy me a drink first, Captain,” Clint snickered. “You can’t get right into those kinds of questions on a first date.”

“If you’re going to be on my team, then I think I deserve to know,” Steve responded, and Clint heard Natasha laugh quietly, a noise more in her throat than her mouth.

“I don’t mind,” she said smoothly. “I’d make a shitty leader because I’ve freshly switched sides, owing to Barton’s indulgence, and SHIELD currently trusts me about as far as they can throw me.” She tilted her head to the side, running her fingers down the small scar on her neck.

“Kill switch,” she continued. “Barton has the command phrase, but I’m sure you can get it if you ask nicely.”

When Clint shifted his gaze from Natasha back to Captain America himself, the blank pasted-on look was back again. Clint wasn’t sure if it was masking anger at potentially being handed such an unpredictable teammate, anger at the existence of the kill switch, or just anger at the entire situation.

“And you?” he asked Clint.

“I jump off buildings,” Clint answered, surprising himself. It wasn’t what he’d intended to say.

“Meaning?” Steve asked.

“Meaning I jump off buildings,” Clint shrugged.

“I’m looking for something a little more specific here,” Steve pushed.

Clint took a deep breath and glanced at Natasha, who had shifted her position to the edge of the bed so her feet could trail on the floor. She still had herself in a relaxed position, but anyone trained would see that she was giving herself better leverage for an attack, should a sudden fight break out. Clint suspected it was more a reflexive response to tension than a conscious expectation of violence.

“Okay,” he said. “I jump of buildings the way you put your plane in the ocean, even though you had enough time to jettison.”

Sharp silence. The edges of it caught against Clint’s breath and reminded him how much he hated the ringing sensation of another person’s intentional quiet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve said deliberately. “I had to make sure…that ship _had_ to go in the ocean. I couldn’t risk something happening unexpectedly. I couldn’t leave.”

“Sure,” Clint said.

Now the air really was thick with tension. Unspoken words were threatening to make themselves known in an unguarded look or unrestrained shift. There was even a moment of cold anger in Steve’s eyes before it was replaced with an empty weariness that Clint recognized from too many unexpected glimpses of himself in stray mirrors.

“So,” Steve finally said. “The Avengers. Has anyone told us what, exactly, we’re supposed to be avenging?”

“I think the idea,” Natasha said, “is that if we do our jobs properly, we won’t be avenging anything at all.”

“So, what?” Steve laughed, humorless. “They’re expecting this team to fail right from the get go? They _named_ us for it, preemptively? Expecting that we’ll have to pick ourselves up and ‘avenge’ our lost battles? Or our lost teammates?”

“Well,” Clint said. “I mean, look at who they’ve given you. On paper, we don’t really look like much.”

“What _do_ you look like on paper?” Steve asked suddenly, as though just realizing, if he was being given a team, that it probably wouldn’t be made of normal soldiers.

“I’ve got a bow and arrow,” Clint answered.

“I look incredible in a red dress,” Natasha added.

Steve blinked once.

“Fantastic,” he said.

***

Clint and Natasha slipped out soon afterward. They’d found the conversation more emotionally wearying than they’d been hoping for, and were ready to move on. Besides, they’d gotten what they’d come for.

“Verdict?” Clint asked Natasha, as they pushed into Clint’s temporary room. Natasha had one next door, but neither of them had brought it up.

“He’ll be a good leader,” Natasha said.

“If? I can hear the ‘if’ in your voice there, just go ahead and finish your sentence.”

“If he can be convinced to give a shit,” Natasha said.

Clint chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, before turning and pulling his shirt off over his head. He flopped down on the bed, tossing the shirt across the room half-heartedly, and turned his face to the side so he could look at Natasha.

“Well, if he figures it out,” he sighed, “I hope he’ll share the secret.”

Natasha hummed, then pulled out her phone, tapping at the screen until she gently raised an eyebrow.

“What?” Clint asked.

“We got an email informing us that the meet-and-greet with Captain Steven Rogers has been postponed.”

“Woops,” Clint laughed. “Good thing we went ahead and did it tonight then, huh?”

Natasha slid her phone back into her pocket and shrugged.

“Or,” she suggested. “It was Fury’s intent to have us do exactly as we did, and he now has no more need for pretense.”

“Well shit,” Clint laughed. “You know what? I’m putting my money on that one. So then, if we won’t be discussing our life and times with Captain America, what _are_ we going to be doing tomorrow?”

“Rogers will apparently be placed in a training and integration program. We’ll still be attending the conference room as planned. Apparently, we have a briefing.”

“Fine,” Clint sighed, burying his face in the pillow. Then, muffled, “Whatever.”

Steve Rogers might not be thrilled by the turn his own life had taken, but Clint was thinking that sleeping for seven decades was starting to sound pretty good, especially when Natasha sripped down to her tank top and laid down beside him.

***

“Congratulations, Ms. Romanoff,” Fury said, drawing all eyes to him as he pushed through the doors into the conference room. “You’re officially a SHIELD Agent.”

“Lucky me,” Natasha said dryly. Then she tilted her head to the side, pointing to her neck. “And this?”

“Mostly useless.”

“Mostly?” Clint snapped. “SHIELD doesn’t hold kill switches over their Agents.”

“Calm your ass down, Barton. This is as good as it’s going to get. Almost every aspect of that particular security measure has been deactivated. The only part that remains is the kill-phrase, and only a handful of people ever had that anyway. You’re the only one of them that’s near her with any consistency.”

“Lucky me,” Natasha said again, and this time Fury’s gaze flicked to her in amusement, before returning to glare at Clint.

“Why now?” Clint asked.

“Why not?” Fury answered with practiced nonchalance. “Why can’t young Agents these days just be grateful for what they’re given? Don’t respond to that, Barton. I’d hate to have to discipline you for insubordination just before you leave on a mission.”

With that, he slid manila folders across the table to each of them. Clint couldn’t help the sudden realization that the last time he’d been handed a missions file it had jerked his feet out from under him and handed him Natalia Romanova as a teammate. Or a pet, depending on how jaded you wanted to be about the whole situation.

He flipped open the file with a sharp huff of annoyance, fully aware that he was bordering on a childish and petulant fit, and scanned the first few lines.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do in New Mexico?” he snapped. And okay he was probably a lot closer to that petulant fit thing than he meant to be, but that kill switch tactic was getting old.

“New Mexico?” Natasha said. “I’m going to New York.”

“I was thinking,” Fury said with a not-really-hidden-at-all grin, “that you kids ought to have some extra-curricular time apart from each other. After all. A team is only as good as its parts.”

“Looking to test my integrity?” Natasha asked. “I think you’ll find I’m more ductile than brittle. Don’t worry.”

Fury placed the fingers of his hands on the table in front of him, leaning over it slightly in order to do so. It let him look Natasha straight in the eye, without either one of them having to even tilt their head or shift their eyes. Clint fought the urge to swallow heavily in nervous tension.

“Your ductility,” Fury said slowly, “is the primary cause for concern, according to every superior that I have.”

“What a shame then,” Natasha smirked, “that it’s your favorite part of me.”

Clint wondered if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack.

***

“You do realize that it’s just as much a kill switch over you as it is over me, right?” Natasha murmured. They were lying side-by-side in the dark, and Clint could feel his shirt sleeve shift slightly as Natasha repositioned herself to better whisper in his ear.

“I’m starting to get that, yeah,” Clint sighed. “Don’t worry. I’ll behave.”

There was a long silence after that.

And then: “All right. Then so will I. Though that reminds me, what’s in New Mexico?”

“Some fucking hammer. What’s in New York?”

“Tony Stark.”

“Okay yikes. I was going to offer to trade, but nevermind.”

***

Natasha contemplated the woman sitting across from her. The last few weeks had been rough and hectic and Pepper Potts was barefoot and sitting with her feet up on the couch.

“Wine?” Natasha asked, already handing over the bottle.

For a minute, she thought that Pepper was going the fuck-it-all route, drinking straight from the bottle, but she seemed to change her mind and reached for the glass on the end table next to her. It was a pretty hefty glass of wine, and she didn’t even attempt to speak until she was almost done with it.

Still, “Is this normal for you?” happened eventually. To her credit, it obviously wasn’t the first question on Pepper’s mind. And it hadn’t been prefaced by something inane like, “Wait, you’re a _spy_?” so Natasha decided to answer.

“In a way,” Natasha said. “Some parts of it were…new. But I suppose the only honest answer to that question is yes.”

“Is it worth it?”

That wasn’t what Natasha had been expecting. She’d been expecting “how do you do this?” and “can I do this?” or even “how do I get out of this?” This question was more difficult by its very resonance. Natasha felt her eyes flick toward the bottle of wine, still half full, as the silence stretched on.

“Yes,” she enunciated. “It will be worth it. I swore…I…” Is she seven years old again, stumbling over her words like this? “I took an oath that it would be worth it.”

“And what does that mean?” Pepper asked. Her eyes were still sharply focused, despite the wine.

“It means I’m going to _make_ it worth it. You should, too. At least you know that yours cares about you. I don’t think mine has completely decided yet.”

That got a single raised eyebrow from Pepper in response.

“I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” Natasha said firmly, before any more questions could be asked. And, thankfully, Pepper took it for the desperate request it was.

***

“Do you believe in gods?” Clint asked her quietly.

“Gods?” Natasha responded.

“Like, the gods of old. Do you believe in them?”

“Why?”

“Nothing. I just…I think I saw one when I was in New Mexico.”

“Oh.” Because there’s really nothing else she can say to that. Then, “After my report, Fury put Tony Stark is back on the Avengers list.”

“Oh.”


End file.
